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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 18, 2014 - 04:30pm PT
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thanks for making my point, rick.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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May 18, 2014 - 05:23pm PT
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He self erased from fear of leaving an embarrassing record of argument loss to the superior intellect of The Chief et al,
that may be the funniest, most delusional thing you've ever posted.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - May 19, 2014 - 10:58am PT
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Sketch
Trad climber
H-ville
May 18, 2014 - 11:48am PT
[Right-wing OpEd]
Is the bloom off the rose?
I don't know Sketch. In your opinion, is it?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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May 19, 2014 - 05:00pm PT
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Penguin dreams
We saw two new studies last week, one observational and one modeling, both with bad news about irreversible collapse of major West Antarctic ice streams.
Today there's further strong confirmation of Antarctic change in a new observational paper in Geophysical Research Letters. This one is based on Cryosat data, the most detailed set of satellite observations to date. Cryosat is a European satellite, and BBC has a nice summary.
The study authors divide the continent into three sectors - the West Antarctic, the East Antarctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the long finger of land reaching up to South America. Overall, Cryosat finds all three regions to be losing ice, with the average elevation of the full ice sheet falling annually by almost 2cm. In the three sectors, this equates to losses of 134 billion tonnes, 3 billion tonnes, and 23 billion tonnes of ice per year, respectively.
The East had been gaining ice in the previous study period, boosted by some exceptional snowfall, but it is now seen as broadly static in the new survey. As expected, it is the western ice sheet that dominates the reductions. Scientists have long considered it to be the most vulnerable to melting. It has an area, called the Amundsen Sea Embayment, where six huge glaciers are currently undergoing a rapid retreat - all of them being eroded by the influx of warm ocean waters that scientists say are being drawn towards the continent by stronger winds whipped up by a changing climate.
About 90% of the mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going from just these few ice streams. At one of them - Smith Glacier - Crysosat sees the surface lowering by 9m per year.
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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May 19, 2014 - 06:07pm PT
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^^ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY required by the deniers^^
Typical.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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May 19, 2014 - 06:11pm PT
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Chief
Right on time.
I'd figured my post would smoke you out of your cave.
Enjoy this year's Sierra fire season.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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May 19, 2014 - 06:25pm PT
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Eric Rignot, lead author of last week's technical GRL paper, also put the research findings in plainer words for a Guardian article:
Last Monday, we hosted a Nasa conference on the state of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, it could be said, provoked something of a reaction. "This Is What a Holy Sh#t Moment for Global Warming Looks Like," ran a headline in Mother Jones magazine.
We announced that we had collected enough observations to conclude that the retreat of ice in the Amundsen sea sector of West Antarctica was unstoppable, with major consequences – it will mean that sea levels will rise one metre worldwide. What's more, its disappearance will likely trigger the collapse of the rest of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which comes with a sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.
Two centuries – if that is what it takes – may seem like a long time, but there is no red button to stop this process. Reversing the climate system to what it was in the 1970s seems unlikely; we can barely get a grip on emissions that have tripled since the Kyoto protocol, which was designed to hit reduction targets. Slowing down climate warming remains a good idea, however – the Antarctic system will at least take longer to get to this point.
Controlling climate warming may ultimately make a difference not only about how fast West Antarctic ice will melt to sea, but also whether other parts of Antarctica will take their turn. Several "candidates" are lined up, and we seem to have figured a way to push them out of equilibrium even before warming of air temperature is strong enough to melt snow and ice at the surface.
Unabated climate warming of several degrees over the next century is likely to speed up the collapse of West Antarctica, but it could also trigger irreversible retreat of marine-based sectors of East Antarctica. Whether we should do something about it is simply a matter of common sense. And the time to act is now; Antarctica is not waiting for us.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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May 19, 2014 - 06:26pm PT
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This just in,
California's finest democrat governor Jerry Brown said, "climate change and global warming are causing the fires in Cali right now"
Can he really say this? I mean really? Is the earth already so warm it just bursts into flames
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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May 19, 2014 - 06:29pm PT
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Can he really say this? I mean really? Is the earth already so warm it just bursts into flames
That's kinda dumb. Can you think of another way that climate change might affect the frequency of fires?
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crunch
Social climber
CO
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May 19, 2014 - 06:29pm PT
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Thanks, Chiloe.
The Guardian seems to have good coverage of what's going on. Interesting article a couple days ago by Eric Rignot. Explains how global warming has worked with some local Antarctic cooling to create stronger winds which in turn have worked to stir up ocean heat which is undermining and weaken ending the ice of West Antarctica:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/climate-change-antarctica-glaciers-melting-global-warming-nasa
Today the Guardian has measurements of Antarctic ice loss, 160 billion tonnes per year now. This from the same Cryosat data you mentioned:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/19/doubling-of-antarctic-ice-loss-revealed-by-european-satellite
There's a lot of time to plan but it's hard to imagine just how huge cities like New York, Rotterdam, New Orleans, London, Miami, on and on, will deal with this.
Good news is that the Colorado River will have a better chance of reaching the sea in the future....If the river won't come to the sea, the sea will have to come to the river!
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crunch
Social climber
CO
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May 19, 2014 - 08:38pm PT
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There it is... So now you Warmist decree that you can "Control" the earth's climate?
How do you plan on doing that? How are you all planning on "Controlling" the ENSO, NAO, AO etc etc etc
Chiloe, Crunch etal.
Of course, how foolish of me. It is going to take lots more climate science research and tons of the tax payers money to do so.
True. All true. But the "lots more" money that will go to a few thousands of scientists to get better answers to these questions is peanuts compared to the amounts that will be needed if these "possible" changes came about as projected. To deal with moving millions of people from coastal areas? or protect vast coastal cities?
Money spent on getting a better idea whether these "possible" changes will actually happen, and how soon, seems to me a good investment.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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May 19, 2014 - 09:09pm PT
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Chief
I refer you to that old Fairy Tale. As true now as it was in Aesop's time, 600 BCE
The Grashopper and the Ant.
Oh I will. As I have been since I first began climbing in the Sierra back in 1968. Yeah, I know you get paid more when the East Side is on fire.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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May 19, 2014 - 09:47pm PT
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Alright Sketch
We already know one thing we must do. We must create the political will to accept that it's happening and that it is only prudent and moral to reduce it.
We must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as much and as soon as possible. That won't stop Global Warming but will give us some extra breathing room.
Over the long run it will save us a great deal of money to get started early rather than late.
To not act is patently insane and immoral.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - May 20, 2014 - 10:35am PT
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From the beginning, this problem was about catastrophic consequences.
The flooding in Boulder, Super Storm Sandy, drought the west US, record heat in Australia, Serbia/Bosnia floods, open oceans in the Arctic, etc, etc.
You say there's no proof this is caused by AWG, while the scientists say this is exactly what they predicted years ago. So, you're saying that they shouldn't tell it like it is because people don't like the message if it affects the status quo?
I read the other day that the drought in CA, the nations food basket, is going to cause food prices to soar.
Blame it on Obama.
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WBraun
climber
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May 20, 2014 - 11:53am PT
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Bruce is a nut.
He'll give you 10 posts with a ton of verbal flowery language saying
absolutely nothing which anyone with any good intelligence can give in one simple sentence.
3 2 1 watch as he'll prove it time and time again ....
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karen roseme
Mountain climber
san diego
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May 20, 2014 - 12:32pm PT
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More from the New Yorker...
"If you hang around climate scientists, you often hear the saying “Uncertainty is not our friend.” It came to mind yesterday, when two teams of scientists released papers that reached the same terrifying conclusion. A significant chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun to disintegrate and, owing to the ice sheet’s peculiar topography (much of it lies below sea level), this process, having begun, has now also become unstoppable. “Today we present observational evidence that a large section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” the lead author of one of the papers, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.” Rignot said that melting in the section of West Antarctica that his team had studied could cause global sea levels to rise by four feet over the course of a couple of centuries. Since the disappearance of some of its major glaciers could quite possibly destabilize the entire ice sheet, the ultimate sea level rise from West Antarctica, he said, could be triple that.
“Scary,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at Potsdam University, who was not involved in either paper, tweeted. “One of the feared tipping points of the climate system appears to have been crossed.”
“This Is What a Holy Sh#t Moment for Global Warming Looks Like,” read a headline on the Web site of Mother Jones.
The vulnerability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or WAIS, has been appreciated for a long time; all the way back in 1968, an eccentric Ohio State glaciologist named John Mercer observed that the WAIS was peculiarly unstable, and that it may have melted away in the geologically recent past. But Mercer (who, interestingly enough for a glaciologist, liked to do field work in the nude) published his observations in an obscure journal, and, according to the historian of science Spencer Weart, “did not push his views on colleagues.”
In more recent years, even as forecasts of global sea-level rise have been notched up, most projections have not taken into account the possibility of a significant, near-term ice loss from the West Antarctic. The most recent analysis by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts a global sea-level rise for this century of somewhere between one and three feet; the new findings, according to Rignot, will require these figures to be revised upward.
Of the many inane arguments that are made against taking action on climate change, perhaps the most fatuous is that the projections climate models offer about the future are too uncertain to justify taking steps that might inconvenience us in the present. The implicit assumption here is that the problem will turn out to be less serious than the models predict; thus, any carbon we have chosen to leave in the ground out of fear for the consequences of global warming will have gone uncombusted for nothing.
But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be more serious. In fact, it increasingly appears that, if there is any systemic bias in the climate models, it’s that they understate the gravity of the situation. In an interesting paper that appeared in the journal Global Environmental Change, a group of scholars, including Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard, and Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist at Princeton, note that so-called climate skeptics frequently accuse climate scientists of “alarmism” and “overreacting to evidence of human impacts on the climate system.” But, when you actually measure the predictions that climate scientists have made against observations of how the climate has already changed, you find the exact opposite: a pattern “of under- rather than over-prediction” emerges. The scholars attribute this bias to the norms of scientific discourse: “The scientific values of rationality, dispassion, and self-restraint tend to lead scientists to demand greater levels of evidence in support of surprising, dramatic, or alarming conclusions.” They call this tendency “erring on the side of least drama,” or E.S.L.D. for short.
Unfortunately, we live in dramatic times. Yesterday’s news about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is just the latest reminder of this; there will, almost certainly, be much more “surprising” and “alarming” news to follow. Which is why counting on uncertainty is such a dangerous idea.
Photograph: Jefferson Beck/GSFC/NASA
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/the-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-melt-defending-the-drama.html
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