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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 19 2019, @07:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the going-going-gone dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The world has a third pole – and it's melting quickly

Khawa Karpo lies at the world's "third pole". This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau, home to the vast Hindu Kush-Himalaya ice sheet, because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – the Chinese glaciers alone account for an estimated 14.5% of the global total. However, a quarter of its ice has been lost since 1970. This month, in a long-awaited special report on the cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists will warn that up to two-thirds of the region's remaining glaciers are on track to disappear by the end of the century. It is expected a third of the ice will be lost in that time even if the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is adhered to.

Whether we are Buddhists or not, our lives affect, and are affected by, these tropical glaciers that span eight countries. This frozen "water tower of Asia" is the source of 10 of the world's largest rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yellow, Mekong and Indus, whose flows support at least 1.6 billion people directly – in drinking water, agriculture, hydropower and livelihoods – and many more indirectly, in buying a T-shirt made from cotton grown in China, for example, or rice from India.

Joseph Shea, a glaciologist at the University of Northern British Columbia, calls the loss "depressing and fear-inducing. It changes the nature of the mountains in a very visible and profound way."

Yet the fast-changing conditions at the third pole have not received the same attention as those at the north and south poles. The IPCC's fourth assessment report in 2007 contained the erroneous prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This statement turned out to have been based on anecdote rather than scientific evidence and, perhaps out of embarrassment, the third pole has been given less attention in subsequent IPCC reports.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday September 19 2019, @11:22AM (13 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 19 2019, @11:22AM (#896049) Journal

    This is how glaciologists refer to the Tibetan plateau,

    Did you read the first few sentences? This is how glaciologists actually refer to the ice under discussion. Neither we, nor the Guardian reporter, made the term up. So in that context the headline matches up with what is written in TFS.

    We receive submissions from a variety of sources. Some are from our community and have been researched and edited to a good standard so that our workload is minimal. Most submissions in this category have good headlines too. Others are made via IRC, and often contain nothing more than a link to the relevant page. The full editing task has to be done by ourselves. Yet others are collected by bots and suffer from the same problem. It might seem as a trivial task to change the submissions to something that can be used on the front page but the task can sometimes take 20-30 minutes. When this happens, it is often all the editor can do to verify the contents of the submission, and carry out the usual checks to make sure that we are complying with legal requirements regarding fair use and to ensure that we are not leaving the site open to a legal challenge, and push the story out. We will, in most of these cases, use the title under which the story is published.

    Better written submissions from the community will help us considerably, otherwise we will do what we can to keep the ever-hungry story queues full.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday September 19 2019, @12:00PM (7 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday September 19 2019, @12:00PM (#896056) Homepage
    With great sadness, after doing minimal research (DDGing "third pole glaciology"), I discover yet another science that has taken a word with a perfectly well understood meaning (one of a pair of endpoints of a rotational axis) and given it a completely different meaning.

    There's no other pole at the other end of the axis, because there's no axis, because there's no bloody rotation.
    What I'm trying to say is that, no matter what glaciologists call it, there's no goddamn pole in Asia.

    Dear glaciologists, please kill yourselves. Everyone else - burn as much fossil fuel as possible: the quicker we can melt all the ice on the planet, the quicker we can put these fuckers out of a job.

    A peanut is a nut. Suck it. (And I demand both an insightful and an informative for every flamebait.)
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:47PM (#896077)

      What I'm trying to say is that, no matter what glaciologists call it, there's no goddamn pole in Asia.

      I'm sure there are a bunch of Poles in Asia. Not as many as there are in Poland, but that's to be expected, no?

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:18PM (#896085)

      Glaciology has been taken over by the climate change religion run by the deep state. The glaciologists are just the deep state's pets.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 19 2019, @05:39PM (3 children)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday September 19 2019, @05:39PM (#896185) Journal

      I discover yet another science that has taken a word with a perfectly well understood meaning (one of a pair of endpoints of a rotational axis) and given it a completely different meaning.

      It's called a term of art. It helps scientists talk to each other and happens in every discipline.

      I guess computer scientists should kill themselves too for building architectures that aren't buildings, coding in dirty cleanrooms, and don't even get me started on bandwidth!

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:51PM (2 children)

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:51PM (#896203) Homepage
        False analogy. Those phrases were coined because the thing did have the property in question, under some interpretation. Clean rooms were clean (of the influence to be avoided), software architects were fabricating something, fabrication being the origin of the word. There is no interpretation of pole that makes a plateau in asia a pole. This is simply the loss of "ice cap" from the concept "polar ice cap" when referring to another ice cap. Which is retarded.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @07:27PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @07:27PM (#896222)

          What do you think of when you picture yourself standing at the poles? The North pole is a vast expanse of glacial ice. South Pole is a vast expanse of glacial ice. This third "pole?" Why I daresay it is a vast expanse of glacial ice.

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday September 20 2019, @08:09AM

            by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday September 20 2019, @08:09AM (#896426) Homepage
            You do realise that you're talking to someone who's spent time in Lapland in winter? The only point I felt like I was at a pole was on my way back down south again, through Rovaniemi, and a quick diversion to Santa's workshop. The rumours it's in Greenland are a lie. Greenland's just a huge sheet of ice. Which apparently isn't all that uncommon after all...
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @05:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20 2019, @05:14AM (#896399)

      Well there's monopoles, dipoles, quadrupoles, octopoles, etc. You get the picture. Which pole are you sad about?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @05:18PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @05:18PM (#896167)

    When this happens, it is often all the editor can do to verify the contents of the submission, and carry out the usual checks to make sure that we are complying with legal requirements regarding fair use and to ensure that we are not leaving the site open to a legal challenge, and push the story out. We will, in most of these cases, use the title under which the story is published.

    I've been wondering about this for a while. I'm the (well, AN) Anonymous Coward who has submitted a few stories, but I usually go out of my way to create a new headline, and usually try to minimize copy-paste from the article. I had thought that we would want to avoid plagiarism or other legally-actionable items.

    It sounds like it's better TO copy-paste content from the original article. How does this work, from a legal and/or administrative perspective? How much should we be copying, and why?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:05PM (#896189) Journal

      How long is a piece of string? Even the law is imprecise on how much is fair use and how little might be viewed as plagiarism. The short answer is that you needn't worry about it. SN is responsible for ensuring that the stories that we publish comply with our understanding of the law. The job is actually the role of the editors and we sometimes disagree with just how much we can publish. When we have such discussion we usually, in fact almost always, tend to err on the side of caution. We have not had a an instance of 'pushing the boundary' for at least 3 years to the best of my recollection.

      What we require from a submission is an interesting article that is usually based on something published by someone else. In this way we are reporting what somebody else has reported - if they have made an error then we are not legally liable for any of the consequences. We are merely pointing out what somebody has said and. as long as we can prove it by quoting the source reference, then we think that we are OK.

      When we receive a submission we all have our individual ways of processing them. But, they always contain the following elements. We compare the source with the submission - you might be surprised to hear that we have had, on occasion, a submission that intentionally misquotes a source in the hope that it is published. We have to make a judgement on how much of the source is quoted. In most cases this is relatively easy to assess but, as I have said, we do sometimes have differences of opinion. Every story should be viewed by at least 2 editors to prevent any one editor from pushing his/her own personal views rather than reporting what is actually being said by the source, and to ensure that we are not publishing more than could be described as 'fair use'. And we also get on with the usual tasks associated with editing. This probably also explains why we repeatedly stress that multiple editors read every submission.

      If, however, the submission is not one that we feel justifies publication it might be rejected and, if the submitter is not an AC, we might suggest that it be placed in the submitter's journal. We are not responsible for the content of journals and we hope that we have made this clear.

      So, make your submissions, and don't worry. Most times you will be within what is considered acceptable. If not, we are happy to adjust it and to help with formatting etc - after all, that is our role. Follow the submission guidelines and remember to keep your personal views separate from the factual report. You can always express your own opinion in the comments later, which is where your views should be.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @09:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @09:36PM (#896267)

        Thanks for explaining.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:47PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:47PM (#896249)

      I've been wondering about this for a while. I'm the (well, AN) Anonymous Coward who has submitted a few stories, but I usually go out of my way to create a new headline, and usually try to minimize copy-paste from the article. I had thought that we would want to avoid plagiarism or other legally-actionable items.

      Plagiarism means attaching your own name in order to take credit for someone else's writing. This summary of this article (and presumably most if not all articles on SN) is clearly not plagiarism because the source is attributed -- the submitter is not presenting the quoted text as their own work.

      I'm not aware of any jurisdictions where plagiarism, in and of itself, is "legally actionable". Plagiarism is a Big Deal™ pretty much only in academia because proper attribution is so important to academics, but that just means plagiarists get kicked out of universities.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @09:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @09:37PM (#896268)

        In retrospect I should have described it as "copyright infringement" rather than "plagiarism." It makes me wonder if there is a difference.