In the case of suicide, people sometimes don't have access to the right materials, don't know the proper way to handle them, and may also have (subconscious) doubts about suicide. I'm sure if somebody is strapped down, the mask is applied properly, and you leave it on for a few minutes after the heart has stopped, nobody's going to survive.

If it's not painful enough, have somebody else punch them in the stomach at the same time.

Except that the sudden loss of blood pressure to the brain would normally cause immediate loss of consciousness. Of course, the fact that the decapitated people can't really tell what's happening makes it hard to tell exactly if/what they are experiencing.

Give them a small mouth/nose mask attached to a nitrogen supply. Quick, painless, and you don't have blood everywhere.

There could still be a lot of plastic in the Arctic of course. Some currents are more likely to collect the plastic in one area, and it's plausible something like that is happening in the Arctic. But adding the "trapped in ice" doesn't really make sense, if there's a constant exchange between water and ice, and each having the same concentration of plastic.

Most of the current sea ice is less than 10 years old, as the ice regular melts in the summer, and is replaced by fresh ice in the winter. It's hard to imagine that there are significant amounts of plastic trapped in the ice compared to plastic that is free floating in the ocean.

You can model the effect of aerosols, but you can't predict when the next volcano erupts, or how much Chinese coal plants will generate in the next decade. I don't know if "negligible" is the right word. It is true that the influence of the sun is rather small, but it's still there. Of course, the output of the sun has diminished since the 80's, so you can't use it to explain the warming.

For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols, the sun, or ENSO cycles. 1998 was a peak El-Nino year, with a record heat, so this skews the results for the interval starting at 1998. It is instructive to look at the temperature data, but compensate it for those three factors. The result shows an unmistakable trend, that has not paused at all: http://tamino.files.wordpress....

How is this relevant for Antarctic ice loss ?

I found the following numbers: volume = 1.3 billion km^3, expansion coefficient = 250 ppm/K, heat capacity = 3.993 kJ/kg/K. Average depth = 3.68 km. So, to get a rise of 7 feet, a temperature rise of 2.32 K is required, which requires 1.3E21 * 3993 * 2.32 = 1.2E25 J total, or 1.4E23 per year. That's quite a bit less, but still a lot of heat. But of course, not all of the 7 feet rise will be due to thermal expansion. Over the last couple of years, about 75% of the rise in sea level was due to melting ice, and only 25% due to thermal expansion.

The temperature rise as a result of doubling CO2 that is referenced in IPCC reports is the steady state result. It will take several decades for the earth to reach that new equilibrium, due to enormous heat capacity of the oceans. By the way, where did you get the numbers for the noise ?

It's not like there will be no risk for the next 85 years, and then all of a sudden they'll be exposed to flood risk. Rather, the risk will gradually increase as the sea level rises, depending on their exact location and many other factors.

The difference is that nuclear is often situated at the coast to get access to plenty of cooling water, as well as limiting risk of radiation exposure over land.

The 17 graph is still showing a positive trend. http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

The other things have been identified and quantified. The biggest one is the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is an effect that fluctuates fairly unpredictably over multi-year time scales. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... for pretty graphs. During La-Nina years, the extra heat is stored in deeper ocean waters, so on the surface it appears cooler. However, during El-Nino years, the stored heat rises again, and heats up the atmosphere.

Because the ENSO effect is oscillating around the mean, it only provides a temporary relief from CO2-caused warming. The long term trend is still rising.