NASA Study Shows Antarctic Ice Sheet Shrinking 407
deman1985 writes "A recently released NASA study has shown that the Antarctic ice shelf is shrinking at an alarming rate of 36 cubic miles per year. The study, run from April 2002 to August 2005, indicates that the melting accounted for 1.2 millimeters of global sea level rise for the period. From the article: 'That is about how much water the United States consumes in three months and represents a change of about 0.4 millimeter (0.01575 inch) per year to global sea level rise, the study concluded. The study claims the majority of the melting to have occurred in the West Antarctic ice sheet."
Re:just to remind that (Score:2, Interesting)
-- Andyvan
Re:A Whitehouse spokesperson was quoted as saying. (Score:5, Interesting)
I beg to differ. In a recent study [sciencemag.org] by Science Magazine, a search of the ISI database [thomson.com] on the keyword "climate change" yielded 928 peer-reviewed papers, NOT A SINGLE ONE OF WHICH disputed the conclusion that global warming is caused by man-made changes to the atmosphere.
The so-called "debate" only exists in the popular press, where (in a misguided attempt to provide "balance",) 53% of articles express doubt on global warming. Red-staters may not like this article [worldchanging.com] very much either, but I challenge any of them to find a respectable counterargument.
Re:just to remind that (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong. Consensus exists. (Score:2, Interesting)
For a more developed argument, please see Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming [crichton-official.com] paper for the explosive and decisive attack against the method of scrutinizing scientific truth which you just proposed.
Stubbed toes and butterflies. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and if you cycle the car's exhaust through your air conditioner while driving, you won't be getting your groceries back home.
My body is a system too, but when I stub my toe, I don't get a cold.
No, but you will hobble around cursing. And if you continually stub it, say, once every fifteen minutes, you'll probably do some ugly and lasting damage over the course of an afternoon and lose the ability to walk.
The world economy is a system too, but when Enron and Worldcom collapsed, the European market didn't fall to pieces.
No, but Enron and Worldcom are symptoms of the same problems which are causing Europe to slip into America's world war.
Systems can absorb and recover from small changes. More significant inputs, however. . .
People like to latch on to the metaphor that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, but the metaphor is bogus. No butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane, and in fact, butterflies flap their wings all the time, and in the vast majority of the time, no hurricane follows. And not one hurricane in the history of mankind has ever been traced to a butterfly.
Very apt. Thank-you.
Now, let's do some math. . .
If you take twenty liters of gasoline and put it in your car, drive for a week, and then look in your gas tank, the fuel is gone. Where did that twenty liters go? Did it vanish? No. It turned into carbon gas. About Thirty Kilograms worth of carbon gas. (The weight goes up by one third, because while you're breaking down the HC of gasoline, you're adding two O's to each C, creating the CO2 which is the byproduct from a properly running combustion engine.). You complain about people mis-interpreting the butterfly analogy. I complain about people thinking that just because CO2 is an invisible gas it means that it doesn't have any basic physical attributes. Like mass.
Now, let's say you fill your tank up every week during a year. 52 weeks x 30 kilograms. --That works out to about 1500 kilograms per year; 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide you are putting into the atmosphere every year.
Let's multiply that by the number of cars in the average city. . , say, half a million. Then let's multiply that by the number of industrialized cities in the world. . .
Hm. It starts to look like a rather a lot of carbon, eh? Sort of in the billions of kilotons per year region, and all of it put into the atmosphere. --Another way to look at it is to consider the millions of barrels of oil burned every day. Each barrel burned turns into 1.5 times its weight in carbon gas. Every day.
Now the question is. . , are we talking in terms of stubbed toes and butterfly wings, or are we talking about billions of kilotons of carbon gas added to the atmosphere every year?
-FL
Re:0.4mm a year.... (Score:2, Interesting)
You base public policy on whatever data you have available. When you have large unknowns, you do a risk assessment and then decide if that possibility of destroying the planet is important to you or not.
Whatever data we have available?
I measured a temperature increase yesterday in my front yard from 35F to 55F over the course of 12 hours! By my calculations, that's a annual increase of 14600F per year!! I got really worried until my neighbor explained that the temperature went down each night while I slept.
So I adjusted my study and calculated the temperature change over the course of an ENTIRE DAY! The result? An increase of 2F per day. So I'm investing in sunblock companies as it's going to get really hot in the next year.
Measurements over a three year period or even a three hundred year period are meaningless to a 4.5 billion year old planet. Until we have a model showing cause and effect predictions accurately, its all scare mongering, FUD and an effort to introduce social change to placate uneducated fears. Chicken Little, thy name is Global Warming.