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Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:
Greenland's massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.
That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.
Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's ice block—as thick as ten Eiffel Towers end-to-end—were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019 and accounted for 40 percent of the total, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
[...] "2019 and the four other record-loss years have all occurred in the last decade," lead author Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Helmholtze Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told AFP.
The ice sheet is now tracking the worst-case global warming scenario of the UN's climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, noted Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.
[...] Until 2000, Greenland's [runoff ...] was compensated by fresh snowfall.
[...] In 2019, the ice sheet lost a total of 1.13 trillion tonnes, about 45 percent from glaciers sliding into the sea, and 55 percent from melted ice, said Sasgen. It gained about 600 billion tonnes through precipitation.
A study in the same journal last week concluded that the Greenland's ice sheet has passed a "tipping point", and is now doomed to disintegrate, though on what time scale is unknown.
Journal References:
Ingo Sasgen, Bert Wouters, Alex S. Gardner, et al. Return to rapid ice loss in Greenland and record loss in 2019 detected by the GRACE-FO satellites [open], Communications Earth & Environment (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-0010-1)
Michalea D. King, Ian M. Howat, Salvatore G. Candela, et al. Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet driven by sustained glacier retreat [open], Communications Earth & Environment (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-0001-2)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 23 2020, @03:00PM (2 children)
OK, here you go [wikimedia.org]. Ice cores taken from Vostok Station in Antarctica show that atmospheric CO2 has been higher than now in the last 450K years. The current spike began about 15-20K years ago. (Presumably that was the Flintstones and Rubbles burning all that petrol in their pedal racers?) Further, the spikes in CO2 look rather cyclical to the eye, with the spikes recurring at a somewhat regular interval; our current spike fits that pattern.
The same data set shows the temperature has also spiked at roughly the same intervals as the CO2, and that it was higher at peak in the past than we have achieved now.
In other words, the science, the actual data, supports the presence of cyclical variations in atmospheric CO2 and in temperatures. It is the science, the actual data, and you cannot question that.
We do not know what the current peak will be, or to what degree human activity will influence it. There are scientists who have models that try to predict what it will be, but "model" is really just a guess because nobody knows what the future will bring.
It's also worth considering that the sum of human activity is a tiny, tiny fraction of the total energy of Earth's systems. With all the solar energy shining down on the Earth every second and all the tidal forces squeezing and flexing its mass and all the chemical processes occurring within the mantle and in the crust, the fossil fuel industry is a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket, no matter how impressed we are with ourselves or how much we hate the smug assholes who run oil companies.
So let's treat science like what it is, an ongoing series of hypotheses that are disproved or are failed to be disproved, and data like what data is, a series of measurements that might be more or less precise, instead of a 21st century version of HOLY WRIT.
If instead we want to treat science and data like holy writ, then you now have to be quiet and sit down and cease with your alarmism because I brought full science and data to disprove what you were asserting.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday August 23 2020, @07:30PM (1 child)
That's interesting, I hadn't seen that. I just checked the wikipedia article and it confirms your data:
"Carbon dioxide concentrations have shown several cycles of variation from about 180 parts per million during the deep glaciations of the Holocene and Pleistocene to 280 parts per million during the interglacial periods."
BUT it then goes on with
"Following the start of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentration increased to over 400 parts per million and continues to increase, causing the phenomenon of global warming.[9]"
Is that right? Sorry I am probably naive just checking wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2020, @08:11PM
Yes that is right, and many people who make the cycles argument completely ignore that previous CO2 spikes occurred over a much longer span.