NASA: Strange and sudden massive melt in Greenland - Page 17

On September 09 2012 04:37 rackdude wrote:
Accept expert opinion if you are not willing to read it all.

On September 09 2012 04:53 Helios.Star wrote:


You couldve stopped right there, gave him his answer (he asked a question, he didnt say he had some brilliant idea nobody ever thought of), and not sounded like an ass, but...

On September 09 2012 04:46 sc2superfan101 wrote:

*sigh...

how about, accept nothing until proven otherwise by 1) evidence or 2) common sense?

On September 09 2012 05:12 rackdude wrote:
that get me too frustrated lol. Makes you laugh at first then you're sad this is the world you live in. You have to stand up against it sometimes. Everyone seems to accept weird things like quantum mechanics and differentials without too much proof and just think "experts have studied this for years and this is what they have come to, sure I don't understand it all but I will accept parts that I do not know for now" yet when you get one idea you think is novel about climate you throw out all expert opinion and think "I live in this world. I know climate. How are these people so wrong? I mean, I haven't read it all, but this hunch, it's something special."

Lets all get back to real work.

On September 09 2012 05:20 sc2superfan101 wrote:

stand up against skepticism? why would you?

ftr, i don't "accept" quantum mechanics or differentials, or anything else for that matter without solid evidence or proof and proper explanation.

experts studied air for a looooong time before they came up with a reasonably correct theory as to what it was, what it was comprised of, and why it reacted and acted the way it does. there were a lot of theories before the right one, and they all had evidence that seemed to suggest that their (incorrect) theory was correct. a lot of these people were highly intelligent scientists with no hidden agenda, but they were still flat out wrong, despite having most people convinced.

nowhere did i say shit about my opinion on global warming, or any other scientific theory, so.... yeah, try to refrain from putting words in my mouth.

my point still stands: people should be more skeptical of scientists and scientific theories, not less.

On September 09 2012 06:13 decker247777 wrote:
I love how people don't see the connections between how Japan had alot of meltdowns and this right here. Radiation leaked into the atmosphere causing the ozone layer to have a few hiccups which result in this. I believe this will be temporary.

On September 09 2012 06:13 decker247777 wrote:
I love how people don't see the connections between how Japan had alot of meltdowns and this right here. Radiation leaked into the atmosphere causing the ozone layer to have a few hiccups which result in this. I believe this will be temporary.

On September 09 2012 05:43 sc2superfan101 wrote:
i think the flat-out rejection of global warming is due to a couple of factors, the main ones being 1) that it is highly political in nature, 2) that there is a stifling of honest debate about it, and 3) that it is a relatively untested hypothesis.

on your point about "issues which people simply don't understand", I might agree, if it wasn't put with the "just listen to what smarter people tell you" statement and attitude. in my opinion, such fallacious appeals to authority, combined with the strange self-deprecation that inevitably follows them, are dangerous and should be fought against even to the point of error. what i mean is, it is better to err on the side of skepticism than it is to err on the side of blind acceptance.

established scientific facts are few and far between. in fact, i think only the sun being the center of the solar-system could be called a "fact". evolution is a theory (i do understand what a scientific theory is so please don't try to tell me), gravity is... well i'm not sure if "gravity" counts as even a hypothesis. as to what gravity is, i'm pretty sure the science is still out on that one (could be wrong.) global warming, in my opinion, is little better than a hypothesis, due to lack of testing and the (relative) lack of observable data.

"To go against" established scientific fact and theory is probably usually fueled by ignorance. i can take that. however, to be skeptical about established scientific anything is not bad, nor is it necessarily fueled by ignorance. skepticism is specifically not taking a position, so it is hard to blame one for being skeptical, especially about something like science, which begins and ends with skeptical questioning. in science, one should usually try to disprove one's assertion, rather than attempt to prove it.

The Arctic Sea is experiencing rapid ice loss at a pace so fast that the area will soon be ice-free in warmer months, scientists confirmed in a report this week—showing a collapse in total sea ice volume to one fifth of its level in 1980.

The alarming rate of melting was measured by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which uses new technology to measure the thickness of the sea ice in addition to how much of the region is covered.

While ice thickness is more difficult to see with the naked eye, its decline in volume is a harbinger of faster and more alarming ice loss, the scientists urged.

"Not only is the area getting smaller, but also its thickness is decreasing and making the ice more vulnerable to more rapid declines in the future," Christian Haas, a geophysicist at York University in Canada, told NBC News.

The Arctic sea already hit record lows in 2012 with the lowest amount of ice on record, covering only half the average area covered between 1979 and 2012.

The newly released data confirms earlier reports—which included data from NASA's ICESat satellite between 2003 to 2008—that the Arctic, which normally maintains vast amounts of ice throughout the year, may soon be ice-free during warmer months. Another team of scientists came to the same conclusion in September using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center.

"As the satellite measurements show that not only the area decreases but also its thickness, it is actually becoming more likely that the ice will disappear sooner rather than later," Haas told NBC News.

Researchers published the study online in Geophysical Research Letters. "Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive," said co-author Axel Schweiger in a press release. "What this new paper shows is that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid."

For the first time, scientists have managed to demonstrate that ten times more ice melts in the summer months on the Antarctic Peninsula now than it did 600 years ago.

The Antarctic Peninsula is the biggest and most prominent peninsula in Antarctica. It consists of a rugged mountain chain, which rises more than 2000 m high.

Unlike the majority of the continent, the ice on the peninsula experiences a degree of melting every summer. Over recent decades the amount of ice which has melted has been increasing.

It has been known for some time that temperatures across the Antarctic Peninsula have risen dramatically. Over the past fifty years there has been an increase of 2.8C, making this the most rapidly warming region in the Southern Hemisphere. This is over five times the global average and comparable to rapidly warming regions of the Arctic.

At the same time, around 25,000 km2 of ice have been lost from ten floating ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula. This is particularly significant as it takes a long time to replenish snow and ice in this part of the world.

With under 250 mm of precipitation per year, Antarctica is officially classed as a desert. In fact, some parts of the continent haven’t seen any rain or snow for many years. Across the Antarctic Peninsula, the snow and ice simply melts and refreezes. Currently the ice that is lost to melting far exceeds that which is replenished in a year.

The flow of Greenland’s glaciers toward the sea may have increased significantly in the past decade, but a new report in Nature finds that rate of increase is unlikely to continue. “The loss of ice has doubled in the past 10 years, but it’s not going to double again,” said lead author Faezeh Nick, a glaciologist at the University Centre in Svalbard, in Longyearbyen, Norway, in an interview.

That conclusion, based on a new, sophisticated computer model, makes the worst-case scenario of sea level rise — an increase of 6 feet or so, on average, by 2100 — look less likely to play out.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that, in the model at least, the slowdown doesn’t necessarily bring glaciers back to their original, stately rate of flow. And since the heat-trapping gas that has already put into the atmosphere will be there for hundreds of years to come, Greenland will continue to melt indefinitely. The fact that it may not happen quite as fast as the worst-case scenarios might forecast isn’t all that reassuring.

Because even if sea level goes up by only half that much, the combination of rising seas and periodic storm surges could devastate coastal areas around the world. Scientists have concluded, based on earlier studies, that the lower figure of about 3 feet is most likely, and while that research didn’t explicitly calculate anticipated sea level rise, it appears consistent with those estimates.

Earlier studies, based on satellite observations, had also noted that Greenland’s ice flow has started to slow, which means the dumping of icebergs into the ocean should slow as well. Projecting what’s likely in the future, however, is the province not of observations but of models. In this case, Nick and a half-dozen colleagues used a new model that factors in the effects of climate change on both the air above Greenland and on the ocean below.

Those effects, Nick said, depend on the characteristics of individual glaciers. The Petermann glacier in northwest Greenland, for example — one of four the scientists modeled — “has a very long floating shelf, so it’s very sensitive to ocean warming.” As a result, the Petermann has loosed two massive “ice islands” into the sea, one in 2010 that was four times the size of Manhattan, and another, about half as big, in 2012.