"Doomsday Glacier" Threat: Rapid Retreat of Antarctica's Riskiest Glacier:
Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Glacier, is retreating rapidly as a warming ocean slowly erases its ice from below, leading to faster flow, more fracturing, and a threat of collapse, according to an international team of scientists. The glacier is the size of Florida or Britain and currently contributes four percent of annual global sea level rise. If it does collapse, global sea levels would rise by several feet—putting millions of people living in coastal cities in danger zones for extreme flooding.
"Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world," said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). "It's doubled its outflow speed within the last 30 years, and the glacier in its entirety holds enough water to raise sea level by over two feet. And it could lead to even more sea-level rise, up to 10 feet, if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it."
Scambos is the U.S. lead coordinator for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC): a team of nearly 100 scientists funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and U.K. Natural Environment Research Council dedicated to studying the vulnerable glacier. The five-year collaboration is aimed at collecting instrument data throughout the glacier and the adjacent ocean, and modeling ice flow and the future of the ice sheet. Their work has revealed major changes in the ice, the surrounding water, and the area where it floats off the bedrock below.
Thwaites sits in West Antarctica, flowing across a 120km stretch of frozen coastline. A third of the glacier, along its eastern side, flows more slowly than the rest—it's braced by a floating ice shelf, a floating extension of the glacier that is held in place by an underwater mountain. The ice shelf acts like a brace that prevents faster flow of the upstream ice. But the brace of ice slowing Thwaites won't last for long, said Erin Petitt, an associate professor at Oregon State University.
Beneath the surface, warmer ocean water circulating beneath the floating eastern side is attacking this glacier from all angles, her team has found. This water is melting the ice directly from beneath, and as it does so, the glacier loses its grip on the underwater mountain. Massive fractures have formed and are growing as well, accelerating its demise, said Pettit. This floating extension of the Thwaites Glacier will likely survive only a few more years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @09:21PM (35 children)
We could switch to all- electric cars in just one decade.
Proof: that's how long it took extended cab pickups to completely replace single cab pickups
(Score: 5, Funny) by pe1rxq on Monday December 27 2021, @09:32PM (20 children)
It would mean most of the western world has to stop being selfish assholes right now.
We basically fucked up by ignoring decades of warnings. We should go all-electric (better late then never), but the only way we can prevent this dissaster is by killing all pickup-owners and use their bodies and pickups to build a damn in front of this glacier.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @10:04PM (14 children)
Shut up, quit your pc whining, and drop your white-guilt act, Man-Karen. Or is it just Karen?
Everyone everywhere wants to be American and follow the "American dream" wherever they live. 1M people immigrate the the US every year, legally. Every developing non-western country is trying their hardest to turn themselves into Yanks and own a house, car, sports car, truck, boat, and burn whatever energy is needed to get to wherever they are going.
How about China? You must be too young to remember the Beijing Olympics where the pollution was so bad right before they shut down all industries so the air could clear and look all nice and pretty for TV. Look at their largest cities-American skyscraper city duplicates.
You want to know who are the real selfish assholes are? Africa. 70% of the world's projected population increase this century will occur in Africa. In just three decades they went from 300M to >1B humans and by 2100 there will be 3B Africans. And they all want to live like the Americans. Imagine the garbage and resources and pollution needed to support a continent of 3B people, that's 8x US's population. All wanting an American lifestyle.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @10:08PM
But its racist to suggest that anyone besides white people stop procreating!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Michael on Monday December 27 2021, @11:35PM (8 children)
If you think everyone wants everything America has, you must not have been to any other countries. Ask someone from a Nordic country or the Mediterranean what they think of the USA. The polite ones will change the subject, the blunt ones will tell you about all the reasons they laugh at the USA.
To many around the world, especially Europeans, the 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness' line is not even close to the first thing that comes to mind. You've got to go way down the list, past school shooters, medical bankruptcies, the kkk, militarised police, high fructose corn syrup, the TSA, abysmal educational standards, legalised bribery, Gitmo, that vile nonsense you try to pass off as cheese, trinitite, industrial prisons, forcing your service industry staff to grovel for donations and so on, before they get to the truths Americans supposedly hold self-evident. (Though credit where it's due; some of your barbecue recipes and the least commercial fraction of your musicians aren't half bad.)
To a lot of people America has the look of a vulgar, bloated, ageing ex-starlet leveraging the leftovers of her glory days to molest the pool boy, while lacking the minimal introspection (or care) to realise how badly she's humiliating her fat ass.
So if you do ever get a passport (statistically you most likely won't) my advice is practice a Canadian accent before using it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 28 2021, @02:42AM (1 child)
Do you refer to our "prison for profit" scheme, or do you refer to industry within the prison system?
Well - I started this post to explain that we don't have prison industry in the US any more, then I thought of California's fire fighting prisoners - and did a search.
https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-companies-producing-with-us-prison-labor-in-2020-prison-labor-in-the-us-part-ii [corpaccountabilitylab.org]
That's rather eye opening.
Maybe we still are as bad as China?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Michael on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:15PM
It's more the prison for profit thing. Allowing private companies motivated by profit a pretty much free hand to administer facilities and bribe politicians seems like a recipe for disaster. May as well ask a bunch of unsupervised nonces to decide the rules and do the judging for a junior miss pageant. It's rapidly going to degenerate from the intended purpose into a conveyor belt of self-serving abuse and systematic usury.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @03:19PM (3 children)
That's a pretty peculiar list. I cop to the real problems like the ridiculous medical, education, and prison industries. But the school shooters, KKK, corn syrup, legalized bribery, well-paid grovelers? The "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" thing should get ahead of those especially in the Mediterranean countries which have worse problems with legalized bribery and a lack of well-paid grovelers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @06:29PM
Potato, tomato.
(Score: 2) by Michael on Tuesday December 28 2021, @10:05PM (1 child)
What, you really think countries which don't have a culture of massacring each other at the drop of a hat (including those with plenty of guns to do that if they wanted to) don't think of America in that connection?
Of course they do.
Give any non-American a map and ask "where are the school shooters". The majority will point out the USA. It's baffling to me that you might think otherwise. It's one of the main things the USA is known for around the world.
Ask about freedom, happiness etc and the association with the USA will be very much weaker. You'd probably have to spell it freedumbs or call it the iHappiness service plan (tm) to push it above the various forms of barbarism on the list.
Ditto KKK. European history books are just like American ones (but arguably to a lesser extent); they go on and on as long as you like about other countries' racist foundations. The USA is more famous for their love of race-based slavery than anywhere. Even if that's unfair given Europe's imperialist past, that definitely is the common perception.
Corn syrup I'll grant you. Only the foreigners who have visited the USA are likely to be aware of how over-sweetened with fatty liver disease everything tastes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @11:33PM
Last I heard, we were talking about Europe. They had that culture in spades centuries ago while the US never really developed it outside of the Indian wars (colonies can't afford to just massacre each other at the drop of a hat). Meanwhile the US doesn't have that culture now just like Europe doesn't have it now. So what's the point of your post?
I didn't think otherwise. But here's the thing, why am I supposed to care? The media makes a big deal of those things and gosh, people watch the media even outside the US. Sure, it's somewhat more school shootings than other places, but so what? It doesn't make the list of things I worry about because it doesn't happen often.
Well, sounds bad for the common perception then. Again, why am I supposed to care?
If we all cared about the derogatory stereotypes that everyone else had about our particular region, ethnicity, etc, then we wouldn't have time to care about anything else.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @06:50PM
The kkk? The kkk was trying ti keep the ape hybrids in line. Then, as now, Negroids can't help themselves from committing violent crimes against Whites and we're not talking about your jew-sponsored "justified for muh slavery" bullshit either. You probably live in a predominantly White country/area yet welcome the hordes of invaders the Jews are bringing in. You dumb Shabbos Goy, useful idiot, race traitor. You'll learn about the realities of race, or your grandchildren will, one way or another.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday December 29 2021, @02:18PM
You must be American.
None of the things you mention is on the average European's list.
As to "To a lot of people America has the look of a vulgar, bloated, ageing ex-starlet leveraging the leftovers of her glory days", consider that:
That's just off the top of my hat.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:32AM
Uh huh [youtu.be]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:50PM (2 children)
I modded you insightful, but I disagree with you.
I don't think anyone's an asshole.
And what's wrong with that? Show the the physical law preventing it. Show me what makes it inherently wrong. In point of fact, you can't know whether that's optimal in the long term or not.
Here's the thing. The arrow of time goes one way at a macro scale, broadly speaking, because of entropy. TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch--and anyone who tries to sell you one is a charlatan and a fraud. Every last thing we do, or have, or alter (even just continuing to exist) in this Universe inexorably increases entropy and pushes that arrow of time.
That is is our best understanding of the situation (there are fine details for the quantum level). As far as we can tell, for the things we model with thermodynamics, that's how it is. Nothing is free.
So, if everything costs something, why is it wrong? We can't actually avoid that arrow of time happening. Are you about to take it up with your local deity?
Look, I'll let you in on a secret that shouldn't really be a secret: if you want "world peace", you need to continually expand. (To make new resources available for interaction with your existing resources--like your physical instantiation.) It doesn't matter what you set the population at--at some point there will not be enough resources, given a long enough time scale. It doesn't matter how much each "individual" (lines are fuzzy when you start talking pure physics) contributes to the steepness of your entropic gradient (the speed of time, as it were). At some point, the order will be reduced to disorder, and no potential energy will remain.
Expand or die. That's the only rule in the Universe. Instead of brutalizing people here and fighting wars over limited resources, we should be expanding to make sufficient resources available. If you don't expand, you will eventually consume what is here, and the carrying capacity will lower until a fight breaks out. Until enough people are dead that the carrying capacity is adequate. And it'll only continue to drop.
If you want peace, expand. There's a huge universe out there. Let's go see it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @06:35PM (1 child)
The flip side of entropy is that it create some pretty impressive local complexity. In fact, it would seem that the Universe is always seeking ways to increase entropy in the most fantastic, innovative and profligate ways possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @12:47PM
Consciousness is a hell of a way to do it. ;)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @10:43PM (3 children)
Funny how these narratives keep going decade after decade. A lot of problems have been fixed [soylentnews.org] and more and more of the world is becoming part of that "western world". If sea level rise becomes a serious problem, then humanity can readily deal with it at that time. There's no reason to elevate it to a higher importance than it deserves. Meanwhile, we're fixing more important problems right now.
Sounds like it's not worth preventing that disaster then! Amazing how we're supposed to implement solutions that are much worse than the problems they're meant to solve!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @02:10AM (2 children)
Jeepers creepers get a look at the sheepers! You truly are an entitled sociopath that wants to exploit the world and hope everyone will clean up after you.
(Score: 1, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @02:27AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @06:38PM
What if we only kill 1/2 the pickup owners? Is that a fair trade? Or switch pickup owners for poor brown people. Fair now? Cause that's the plan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @11:29PM
I don't think they'd give a damn.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @09:34PM (8 children)
You must have immediately capitulated to the culture war and thought, "Oooh, I'll snark at rednecks and their huge pickup trucks." Good work, you're really contributing to solving the problem.
Electric vehicles let smug people think their "doing something" when they're moving the pollution upstream. Same with solar panels, wind farms, etc. Think lithium and rare earth mining, manufacturing, smelting steel for wind columns, fiberglass manufacture, electrical generation, etc. The truth is that liquid fuels are wonderful dense energy storage mechanisms. Electricity storage is just wastefully inefficient. If we could produce liquid batteries or liquid fuels directly from the air with nuclear fission/fusion then we could change the world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Monday December 27 2021, @09:56PM (2 children)
So you ignore real solutions and hope for some imaginary 'IF"?????
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @10:06PM (1 child)
You missed my point, electric cars are not a real solution. If you read between my lines I lay out what I believe is the real solution: nuclear. We need refreshed fission designs and not just thorium. Breeder reactors need to break down 10,000 year waste into 10 year waste.
Cars aren't even the major form of pollution on earth, most is from manufacturing, especially in emerging markets. Give them some nuclear plants if you want to stop global warming!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday December 27 2021, @11:24PM
I wish your ideas were reasonable. I'd like cheap, safe nuclear reactors to. I just don't see any on the horizon. There's a few promissing developments, but you don't seem to like them. (The molten salt Thorium a something that could probably get out of development and into production fairly quickly if there were a bit of push behind them, and they claim to be able to burn spent reactor fuel. Maybe its true.)
What we actually have available right not that's relatively non polluiting is solar and wind. Some places have hydro, a few places have geothermal. But the hydro requires water, and in some established hydro plants climate change has converted that into a scarce resource. And geothermal is basicly a token effort except, perhaps, in Iceland.
Hell, if I could have what I wish we'd be using cheap fusion. But can you even prove that that's possible? Making future plans based on what appears to be PR releases strikes me as a bad idea.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @10:49PM (4 children)
Even when it is just "moving the pollution", it is possible to contain pollution better by moving it from a few million sources to a few large sources.
Sorry, you lose that argument. Solar panels and wind farms prevent more pollution than they produce. Further, we can use your very argument against you. After all, nuclear power creates pollution in uranium mines and a modest change of radioactivity releases from accidents. You're just moving the pollution!
One can always point to a cost after any change - no matter how trivial or ridiculously advantageous that change might be. You have to do a proper cost/benefit analysis. And solar panels and wind farms fare pretty well when you do.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @11:38PM (1 child)
That depends on what they are calling pollution. NOx, SOx, ash, and all the other crap that comes from burning coal, yes. But they also call CO2 pollution and any attempt to collect that and turn it back into something else is going smack into the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It takes more energy than you got from burning the carbon in the first place.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @11:55PM
Even then, it might be possible depending on the relative efficiencies of internal combustion engines (ICE) and coal power supported electric vehicles (EV). Certainly for the ideal use case for EV, everyone commuting to work with plenty of time to recharge at low demand parts of the day, efficient coal power will trump ICE at the societal level. You'll move more people per unit of CO2 produced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @06:44PM (1 child)
> proper cost/benefit analysis
Just a minor point: there's no such thing.
The "cost/benefit analysis" is at best a management fiction based on local (in both time and space) politics. The only direction is forward, for good and bad. Make the damn machine.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @07:13PM
You just exported the pollution from your keyboard to my brain and it hurts! Let's give an example [soylentnews.org] of very improper cost/benefit analysis:
The author carries a lot of their valuation in terms of connotation. Preventing this disaster is superimportant. The lives of pickup-owners, their pickups, and whatever they were doing with those pickups are not. Everything is viewed strictly through the lens of "preventing this disaster".
While there's no such thing as perfect objectivity, a proper cost/benefit would acknowledge the major, know effects, and assign reasonable values to them, not preventing this disaster = +infinity, saving lives of pickup owners = small to zero.
For another example, let's consider the case of solar cells and wind farms. The earlier assertion was that solar and wind weren't viable environmentally because they "exported the pollution" or something equivalent while fission power did not. I pointed out the fallacy of that.
In our cost/benefit approach, the most rudimentary is that we have costs such as cost of construction in terms of energy/money/land/resources, lives lost, accident costs, and pollutants emitted. We have benefit in terms of energy and displaced costs from other approaches. So a reasonable first step would be what's the cost of these things in terms of energy? Then add in that some more subtle things like solar power can produce more near times of high demand (especially in hot, traditionally sunny areas) and others like wind power aren't very dependable, but fossil fuel and nuclear are.
Point is that you can come up with a cost/benefit with broad agreement once you've broken down costs and benefits well enough and quantified them with reasonable valuations. Nobody will agree precisely, but the idea is that you can do well enough that it's not worth the bother for most people to criticize. Typically the ones who will are the black and white who've assigned infinite positive and negative values to various choices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @10:15PM (1 child)
If you think that extended cab pickups have replaced single cab, you must live far away from where working pickups are the norm. 20, 30, 40 year old pickups are still trucking along, handling work from farming to plumbing and everything in between.
You can even buy single cabs right now, usually in conversion or work truck trim.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 27 2021, @10:42PM
I think GP exaggerated a good deal. But, I don't see very many standard cab pickups on the road these days. They are getting rare.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:19AM
Average age of cars in the U.K. is about 9 years, but adjust for mileage and it’s much lower. If no new petrol cars were sold from today, by 2030 about 3/4s of miles would be electric.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:03AM (1 child)
I missed this earlier. An extended cab truck is a minor change on a single cab truck and it's driven by user demand - the extra internal space is convenient for a lot of uses (such as transporting more people) with little to no drop in performance and fuel economy of the truck.
Meanwhile electric vehicles are a substantial redesign of the vehicle for several reasons, particularly the engines and battery system replacing the more complex transmission linkages of internal combustion cars and the simpler energy storage systems. And people just don't want them that much.
Personally, I think there is a huge missed opportunity here for a fossil fuel-electric vehicle along the lines of train engines. The fossil fuel engine (gas or diesel powered) provides the energy, but it drives a generator which then efficiently passes the energy on to electric motors which will provide the power at the wheels. You can get many advantages of fossil fuel and electric systems like great energy storage, light vehicle weight, no complex transmission system, regenerative braking, and high torque/acceleration.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:07AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 27 2021, @09:28PM (13 children)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf6271 [science.org]
https://thwaitesglacier.org/news/antarctic-glacier-may-be-more-stable [thwaitesglacier.org]
Given that the earth is warming, and the ice is melting, is this one glacier going to cause a "doomsday" event if/when it collapses? It seems that not all the research teams agree on that.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @09:44PM (2 children)
Sorry, but capitalism demands panic. Wanna make big money? Invest in flotation devices, inflatables and accessories
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @10:51PM (1 child)
What capitalism is being furthered by this bit of panic? A lot of ideologies demand some variation of FUD because otherwise you have time to look at the man behind the curtain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:47AM
Building construction for one... All the infrastructure will need refurbishing.. The opportunities are endless! How can you be so blind? Just put your hotdog cart on pontoons...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Monday December 27 2021, @09:46PM (5 children)
It might not be an instant doomsday event, but it will still melt. Just a bit slower
Most people will happily act like the metaphoric frog and be boiled.... (Note: real frogs are not that stupid, but real people unfortunatly are)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 27 2021, @10:11PM (3 children)
And the rest will be boiled by increasingly authoritarian governments limiting what resources they may use but doing nothing to help spread birth control to the emerging markets.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 27 2021, @10:27PM (1 child)
That ship sailed decades ago. All manner of "charitable" organizations in Africa offered clinics, free of charge in many cases, to treat people's problems. Having a baby? Fine, come on in - just sign this slip of paper - good, good, good, this will be your last baby!
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51637751 [bbc.com]
Many, maybe even most, of these organizations were funded by Uncle Sam.
There are many, many such stories, if you search for them.
Imagine what that does to the patient - doctor trust thing, huh?
And, no, the programs weren't restricted to women giving birth. Any excuse to anesthetize a female, and remove her ovaries while she was out was a good excuse.
A portion of my mind says that Africa needs a lot of sterilizations, but FFS, you don't sneak around and violate a person's body while they are incapbable of making an informed decision. All those people who funded forced sterilizations should be sterilized as well.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @07:00PM
All black Africans should be sterilized and Africa made into a nature preserve where Whites and Asians can go on vacation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @10:29PM
What effort needs to be done? It's not that hard for those emerging markets to spread birth control on their own!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 27 2021, @10:28PM
Slower isn't just a "the frog will get boiled anyway". Adaptation is very cheap when nobody notices sea level rise because the natural movement of populations is faster than the problem and the cost is amortized over centuries.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday December 27 2021, @11:31PM (3 children)
Calling this a "Doomsday glacier" is a PR move by someone who thinkgs PR is the most important part of the story. But it is expected to result in the ocean level raising quite a bit. I've seen estimates as high as several feet. Most are a bit less. Still, that's enough to cause enough flooding to mean several cities will need to have finished a bunch of preparations that they've barely started talking about how to do. And it will be quite awhile before the sea level rise is distributed fairly evenly. And it's likely to lead to other waterfront glaciers melting a LOT faster.
Not doomsday, but a lot worse than a major inconvenience.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:09AM (2 children)
When will they need to start? For example, it doesn't make sense now to make plans for something that will happen in 200 years. It's not even worth planning for the planning.
The word here for that is "never". Even if in the hypothetical situation that no sea level rise occurred, the resulting lack of sea level rise would not be distributed equally. There would be plenty of local variation and that would shift over the decades due to processes like the El Nino/La Nina cycle.
This is another convenient bit of FUD. We're still being bullied into buying pigs in pokes. I'm perfectly fine with waiting until we actually hit the first alleged tipping point because then we have an actual problem to respond to rather than some nebulous, poorly understood problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday December 28 2021, @04:04AM (1 child)
1) They should have started planning a decade or two ago. It may take 200 years to reach maximum, but noticible effects have already started happening. Any further rise in sea levels is just going to make things worse.
2) I said "fairly evenly" for a reason. Yes, it's never evenly distributed. But there's also a considerable lag between the time the ice hits the water and when it's in approximate equilibrium distribution. IIRC the North west Atlantic is currently higher than equilibrium, which is part of the reason for excessive flooding in US East Coast states, but another part is the actual increase in equilibrium sea level height. (OTOH, the North East, i.e. Canada, is actually rising relative to sea level as it's still on the bounce from the melting of the last glaciation.)
Caution: I'm not an expert in this field. This is all based on reading articles in places like Science News and Scientific American. If you want real expertise, consult a real expert.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @03:35PM
"Noticeable" is a really low threshold. I want to see actual problems first.
I suppose so, but I doubt that will ever dwarf the effects from ocean currents.
And the northeast, such as New York City and other estuaries, is actually sinking relative to sea level. It depends where you are. My take is that in the long run places that flood a lot will become places where people aren't (aside from low value real estate that no one will mourn getting washed away every so often).
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @12:58AM (2 children)
I'll bet Al Gore (of global warming alarmism fame) is kicking himself for spending millions of dollars on a beachfront house that will soon be underwater. https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2010/04/29/gores-buy-oceanfront-villa [thedailybeast.com]
I'll bet Barack Obama is kicking himself for spending millions of dollars on a beachfront house that will soon be underwater. https://www.homesandgardens.com/news/president-obama-new-house-marthas-vineyard [homesandgardens.com]
It's almost as though the people who are trying the hardest to panic people away from beachfront property are also taking advantage of such panic.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:07AM
Hey, that's new one on me.
Thanks for the info, and you can go back to voting against your own interests. Those guys work hard to sucker you out of your money and future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @01:25PM
> ...beachfront house
You left some presidents out, I wonder why?
Trump - Mar a Lago is clearly beach front
Nixon - San Clemente beach front
...more?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 28 2021, @08:01AM (4 children)
Alternatively, changes could be due to tectonic activity.
But no, climate change is responsible for everything. Also, we need panic-filled headlines to drive clicks.
So, if the entire glacier landed in the ocean, leaving the land completely bare, it would raise sea level by 2 feet. That is obviously impossible. Anyway, the area in question is only the eastern third.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 28 2021, @10:43AM (3 children)
From the summary, emphasis by me:
From your quote, again emphasis by me:
Do you notice something?
Obviously?
Well, an ocean level rise of 8 inch is already bad enough, don't you think?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @03:28PM (2 children)
Not at all. My take is that we won't have to actually act on sea level rise until we're getting close to that sea level rise in two years rather than in well over a century. Presently, we're at about a rate of 8 inches in 50 years. It is increasing and I grant we may hit the rate I mentioned before the end of the century.
But I want to see evidence first. Not breathless FUD.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28 2021, @07:04PM (1 child)
Same. I don't want to know about the fire in the basement until it's an inferno enveloping my bedroom. THEN you may call 911.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 28 2021, @07:17PM