Fact: Earth's colossal ice sheets are melting:
Pay attention to Greenland.
The land's colossal ice sheet — around three times the size of Texas — is melting some 270 billion tons(opens in a new tab) of ice into the sea each year as Earth warms. And the inevitable sea level rise could be worse than scientists calculated: Researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) found that warmer ocean water is seeping underneath and amplifying melting of Greenland's mighty Petermann Glacier, which ends in a great ice tongue floating over the sea. The scientists recently published their research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The glacier lies in northern Greenland, a realm of the high Arctic. But that frigid location can no longer protect it. Scientists found the glacier is vulnerable to the incessantly warming seas. It's another whammy for melting Greenland, which is melting from above (warmer air) and below (warmer water).
Until 2015, satellite observations showed Petermann, a major ice outflow on Greenland, was in solid shape. Not anymore.
"Something changed during the last decade. Petermann was supposed to be a place where the ice was still stable," Enrico Ciraci, a NASA postdoctoral fellow and an Earth system scientist at UCI, told Mashable.
Ice loss is now ramping up.
"Warming oceans are accelerating the mass loss of this glacier," Ciraci, who led the research, said.
Not even the coldest glaciers are immune.
"It's surprising even Petermann isn't escaping the impacts of global warming," Josh Willis, a NASA oceanographer who researches melting in Greenland and had no involvement with the new research, told Mashable.
[...] For some of us, sea level rise might not be nearly as apparent or poignant as the increase in inferno-like Western wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, vanishing Arctic ice, and historic deluges. But it's happening, and it's speeding up.
Since the late 19th century, global sea levels have already risen by some eight to nine inches. Sea level rise each year more than doubled from 1.4 millimeters over most of the 20th century, to 3.6 millimeters by the early 21st century. From just the years 2013 to 2018, that number accelerated to 4.8 millimeters per year.
Yet, crucially, most sea level rise simulations and predictions don't take into account what's happening under Petermann and the many glaciers like it. This means we might be underestimating sea level rise over the coming decades and beyond. In the study, the researchers noted that such ocean melting "will make projections of sea level rise from glaciers potentially double."
"This process is not accounted for in many models today for sea level rise," Ciraci explained. "The potential contribution is significant."
Journal Reference:
Enrico Ciracì, Eric Rignot, Bernd Scheuchl, et al., Melt rates in the kilometer-size grounding zone of Petermann Glacier, Greenland, before and during a retreat [open], PNAS, 2023 120 (20) e2220924120. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220924120
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Monday May 15, @05:47PM (8 children)
The never let a crisis go to waste types will be all over this as usual, with the rest of the population studiously ignoring their bleating.
As for the real world, it'll be as its always been, those who are flexible and hard working will be successful, others, ... not so much.
Its all rather tiresome.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @06:14PM (7 children)
Stage 1: Deny the Problem Exists
Stage 2: Deny We're the Cause
Stage 3: Deny It's a Problem ----- you are here
Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It
Stage 5: It's too Late
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Monday May 15, @06:20PM (6 children)
Is the 'problem' using metrology as a political weapon, or do you mean climate change itself is the problem? I know which one is more likely and its not the latter.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 15, @07:46PM (5 children)
The way I see things, the fact that anything can become a "political weapon" (political football...) is the problem. You'd think / hope that the more advanced people and society become, the more we could work together collectively on important things. There are solutions, and we would be far ahead of the climate problem if people were more pragmatic and less dogmatic.
Nuclear power would have made a huge reduction in the current CO2 output. When I was a kid the Three Mile Island accident [wikipedia.org] made huge headlines. People were shouting and marching with torches and pitchforks (figuratively, not literally) about how there would be major health problems for years. AFAIK, nobody was hurt, even though it was surely a very significant accident. Fortunately it was taken very seriously by everyone involved, and to date the people who run nuclear power stations take safety as seriously as you possibly can. However the public opinion / political / economic damage was done and the US stopped building new nukes.
All that said, we (the US) are getting better as are so many other countries. It takes time to make these changes, and we're doing it slowly. Energy-consuming products are becoming more and more efficient, more and more electric cars and trucks in use, more and more PV and wind generation is being installed.
Some facts: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ [worldometers.info]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday May 15, @08:53PM (4 children)
Sorry, but no, the people who run nuclear power plants DON'T "take safety as seriously as you possibly can". They've got management that takes all the "cost containing measures" that they can get away with. (Possibly you aren't counting management as part of "the people who run nuclear power plants", but they need to be counted.
Of course, the problem is also that a lot of the "required safety precautions" don't really make things safer. It's a difficult problem, with no good answers. The Navy usually manages, with extremely highly trained crews in a military environment. And at a horrendous cost. I don't think you could manage that in a civilian environment. (And the Navy has had a few problems too, but they didn't make headlines.)
In my opinion the real problem is with spent fuel There still isn't any good place to store it, so it just accumulates in places that it shouldn't. That was one of the major problems at Fukushima, and they're not the only folks doing it. There are also occasionally a lot of problems with site selection. Nuclear plants are big and heavy, and you shouldn't just plunk them down anywhere, but frequently is seems that this isn't given sufficient consideration. And there's not enough consideration to the costs of decommissioning the plants. (And ensuring that the money required to properly do that isn't siphoned off to some other use.)
Done right, nuclear power would be an excellent choice. Our track record isn't good. Problems are left to accumulate, companies responsible for a task divert the funds to some other purpose, and then go bankrupt, etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday May 15, @09:20PM (2 children)
Your reaction seems almost angry, and I'm sad for you. I actually work occasionally in the nuclear power industry, literally on safety systems, so I know, all too well, first hand, how stringent they are. They _all_ take it _very_ seriously.
I take it that you're blending everything together in one homogeneous pot? I understand the problem of spent fuel, and that's not my area but AFAIK storing it onsite is the currently accepted method. I don't like it either. Transporting and handling it incurs (much) more risk. What do you suggest?
Fukushima is hindsight, and I'm in the US, so I can't speak to Japan's nuclear safety. I'm sure you know as well as most people that the tsunami was much worse than anyone had anticipated. You can argue all you want, but you'd be wasting your time arguing with me because I never said Fukushima was safe enough. I will say, that tsunami was much worse than scientists predicted could ever happen. I'll also say that like TMI and Chernobyl, scientists and engineers are learning and improving, and there's not much more we can do.
Again, do you have any positive helpful suggestions? Or just venting?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 16, @06:39PM (1 child)
As a safety professional you really should inform yourself of the complete clusterfuck that was Three Mile Island.
They absolutely did cut safety precautions. They then lied their asses off at every step of they way including dramatically understating release quantities.
And, cancer rates did increase afterwards as a likely after effect. [nih.gov]
If the current state of the regulatory landscape is better it is likely a direct result of that near-industry-killing event.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 16, @06:45PM
And just for the record I support properly regulated nuclear power.
It's just that I blame the owners of TMI for blowing up a plant and almost killing nuclear energy, not the environmentalists who were just telling the truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @07:08AM
Sure, our track record isn't great but we really aren't any better when it comes to oil either. For some reason we just seem to care less when we have oil-related disasters, probably because using oil is so much more deeply entrenched in almost every aspect of our lives. It's much harder to say "holy shit that was bad, we need to stop building things that burn oil" than it is to say "holy shit that was bad, we need to stop building things that use nuclear fission".
We have both enormous ecological disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill [wikipedia.org] as well as companies leaving the public holding the bag when they go bankrupt, such as with orphan wells [wikipedia.org] . And that's not even considering the devastating effects of climate change.
(Score: 0, Troll) by XivLacuna on Monday May 15, @05:51PM (12 children)
Is for Europe, USA, Canada, and Australia to destroy their own industrial bases while everyone else does whatever they want. It is only fair. They should also be allowed to use lead pipes and asbestos because we got the benefit of it before they could.
If these global climate cultists actually believed what they spout, they wouldn't allow anyone to spew out excess carbon just because of fairness. Remember, life on the planet is in danger and we can't let something as petty as fairness stop us from saving the world.
This is about destroying certain countries so the bankers can privatize more natural resources that should benefit the people can instead be added to the ever growing katamari that belongs to the bankers.
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Monday May 15, @06:13PM (9 children)
"Church of the Current Thing" and climate change maybe isn't current anymore. OR maybe is, who cares.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bloodnok on Monday May 15, @06:58PM (8 children)
Who cares?
I care. I live in rainforest near the sea. My neighbours will soon start to lose land in winter storms due to rising sea levels. I will likely be burned out by raging summer wild fires if the lousy summer air quality from smoke doesn't drive me out first.
Small Pacific nations will either be ceasing to exist, or will have greatly reduced land area, so I imagine they care.
Low lying countries definitely care, though the rich ones will be able to mitigate much of it at the cost of only trillions of dollars and/or the loss of significant parts of their countries.
The people of those parts of sub-Saharan Africa that have been experiencing the worst droughts in living memory would probably care if they weren't too busy just trying to survive.
The inhabitants of coastal cities who will either have to move away or pay for massive flood defences which may or may not work will probably start caring in the decades to come when the bills start coming in.
The peoples of the Arctic, whose livelihoods depend on the ice and permafrost definitely seem to care.
Even the inhabitants of the Andes and the Himalayas look like being affected as their sources of summer water continue to evaporate.
The world is clearly going to pay a fortune to live with the effects of climate change. What that will do to world economies is anyone's guess. The human cost is going to be worse: we are starting to see it, and it looks like it is going to continue to get worse.
I think the better question is who doesn't care, and why don't they?
__
The Major
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @07:30PM
Pun intended?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @07:43PM (5 children)
We've been hearing doom and gloom like this for (at least) 50 years now, and it still hasn't happened. I'm old enough to remember when the "drop dead" date was 1980. Then, when 1980 passed without disaster, the drop dead date was moved to 1990. Then 2000. Then 2010. Now, it's still, according to the climate cultists, going to happen "real soon now".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Monday May 15, @07:56PM
I hesitated to comment on this, but since you've broken the ice: we keep seeing articles like this, and as a scientist at heart, I'm very concerned. I'll explain:
These kinds of statements are self-undermining. The natural conclusion in most people's heads and hearts: the scientists told us, unequivocally, that they knew everything about X thing. But then some time later they tell us about something they didn't know and are just now finding and recalculating.
The only thing most people will (naturally) conclude: what else don't they know? No point in taking them at their word. They might mean well, but there might be gigantic unknowns. So why should I (anyone) bother to change my life, add expenses to my life, live more efficiently, do without, etc., only to find out the experts were wrong?
To be clear, I'm not advocating this, just writing what I observe seems to be human nature.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @09:01PM (3 children)
I'm old enough to remember people repeatedly claiming "they said" in very definitive terms without noting ANY sense of nuance, when "they said" turns out to be a newspaper or magazine headline (oh, look, it is still being done today!). My favorite is the "they said there was going to be global cooling and look how wrong they were!" They will take a Newsweek article that talks about the buildup of aerosols in the atmosphere and how that could tip the energy balance towards cooling, completely and conveniently (or ignorantly) ignore the Clean Air Act and Montreal Protocols that went into effect afterwards and the effect that had on reducing the amounts of aerosols in the atmosphere, then claim "all the scientists were crying wolf!" That's like me noticing that the trashcan next to your garage is on fire, I tell you "hey, your house is going to burn down," a fireman comes by and puts out the trashcan, then you telling me what an alarmist I am and how wrong I am about your house burning down.
So please inform us with a little more detail where and what these deadlines were. Were they worst case scenarios? Did anything change between predictions? Because as it stands now, not only have the large international models been pretty darn good with their predictions, so were the models done by those well known corporate Exxon "cultist" scientists back in the 70s and 80s. I presume you still don't think there is any connection between regular smoking and lung cancer, or did the internal RJ Reynolds documents finally change your mind? The same PR firms have been working this issue as well. So why don't you at least believe the Exxon scientists?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @10:16PM (1 child)
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-the-climate-apocalypse-is-nigh/ [nypost.com]
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/ [cei.org]
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-eco-pocalyptic-predictions-the-so-called-experts-are-0-50 [aei.org]
https://710wor.iheart.com/featured/mark-simone/content/2019-10-08-the-list-of-120-years-of-climate-scares-by-scientists/ [iheart.com]
https://climatechangedispatch.com/50-years-failed-climate-predictions [climatechangedispatch.com]
https://climatechangedispatch.com/48-of-79-catastrophic-climate-predictions-have-failed-other-31-havent-expired-yet/ [climatechangedispatch.com]
https://climateilluminated.com/predictions/List_Failed_Predictions.html [climateilluminated.com]
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/20/failed-climate-predictions-willie-soon-phd/ [wattsupwiththat.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday May 16, @06:22AM
Holy shit, you've got everything but the Weekly World News in that list of respected scientifically-accurate publications.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 16, @06:51PM
"They said' Y2K was going to blow up all the computers. Stupid programmers!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 15, @08:11PM
>the cost of only trillions of dollars
That's economic activity: jobs, and the opportunity for those at the top to reap the profits. You're not talking about a negative incentive for the decision makers...
>inhabitants of coastal cities who will either have to move away
The problem with non-coastal cities is: they suck, by comparison. Which is why the bulk of the population has ended up living on the coasts, or as close as they can afford to.
>who doesn't care, and why don't they?
You can start with the residents of those sucky non-coastal cities, they think they're just gonna be fine, maybe sell some of their land holdings to the coastal refugees. There was some Superman movie where Lex Luthor bought up the California deserts because he had a plan to sink the coasts west of the San Andreas - people like Lex, they've got their popcorn out and they're watching it all play out on Satellite TV. They have no concept just how bad it could really get, and how the indirect consequences are going to make them even more miserable than they already are living 500+ miles from the nearest ocean.
Oh, and the rest of the population that doesn't really think more than a couple of weeks into the future - yeah, they're pretty hard to sell 401(k) investments to also.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 15, @08:03PM (1 child)
We live in a universe of infinite possibilities.
The primary problem is industrial output per capita multiplied by the population.
Both are still increasing around most of the world, rather rapidly as compared with 150+ years ago.
We could solve this (extend the Holocene environment) with a massive deployment of Neutron bombs. We could solve this with a (real, not dress rehearsal) pandemic. We could suddenly enlighten the populations of the world via LSD in the water supplies and everybody could just stop flying everywhere on jets, driving everywhere in cars, and maybe even get happy with less air-conditioning in their homes and businesses. I think the pipe dream of "economically advanced nations reverse population growth" is a very tenuous point of human behavior which won't work if the "economically advanced" masses ever stop working their asses off 40+ hours per week for the first 60 years of their lives.
>we can't let something as petty as fairness stop us from saving the world.
People I know mostly can't wrap their heads around "fair" in the local area, "Global" fairness is about as possible for them to embrace as giving up their SUV to take the bus instead.
>growing katamari that belongs to the bankers.
Bankers are one tiny aspect of the larger problem, people are going to grab what they can, whether that's a starving family on the border of a wildlife preserve poaching the endangered animals for dinner, politicians climbing from local to national levels by selling their souls to the highest bidders, or coked up bankers reaching for their next million per month income stream by whatever means are legally available to them (definition of legal to include: not getting caught.)
People are people, they're unlikely to change much in the coming decades. We were given the gifts of cheap energy in the forms of coal, then oil, and we just acted like people when given those gifts. The main thing we, as a species, did was go forth and multiply like never before. That's the root of our collective current misery, 8 billion copies, and population really has been the root of misery at all times of limited resources throughout modern history. We have dominion over all the plants, and animals [science.org] - except ourselves.
When we learn how to reduce the human population, by whatever methods, managing the environment will be easy by comparison.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday May 15, @09:48PM
Nah, we don't need to do anything. The deterioration of the environment will take care of the problem, although not in a pleasant way for a large number of the population.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15, @07:32PM (1 child)
Must be named after the famous green snow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @12:14AM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gznork26 on Monday May 15, @07:41PM
Since our lives rarely reach the century mark, our experience of the world is like a single frame of an epic movie. We accept the world as it is when we become aware of it, and as far as we're concerned, everything was always much as it is now. Unless we learn about the past, we have nothing to compare what is to what was. It's hard to look at the thriving city you might live in and imagine the scattering of settlements that had once been there. And even these changes are a flash in the pan compared to the changes which the land itself underwent over much longer periods. Rivers change their course over time. Lakes come and go. Mountain ranges gradually rise or are slowly eroded. And all through that slow process, there are sudden changes such as earthquakes, volcanos and meteor strikes.
We're not really equipped to grasp changes on that scale. Even knowing about them required the development of a skein of interlocking sciences able to reveal the buries past of our planet. So in order to accept that we are in the midst of a major change in the climate on our planet, we first must accept the validity of that science, which many people have reasons not to.
What is now in process has many aspects, so it can be described in many ways. If we focus solely on sea level, for example, we ignore the ecological effects of what it happening, and pay no attention to smaller and more localized changes which are driven by the larger and perhaps subtler changes. We might accept that the tides have been washing though our coastal city even without a hurricane to drive them, but fail to connect this observable change to things that are reported elsewhere, because there are many different kind of changes caused by what is happening.
Nevertheless, the world we were born into has been changing in ways that our science tells us we have been responsible for. Ignore this at your peril, because things like melting glaciers which raise sea level are not local effects. Our civilization, all of it, is based on many assumptions about the stability of the climate. As it changes, so does the patterns of rain, winds, and storms which determine where we can grow our food and raise the plants and animals we use for food and clothing. Transportation on land, see and air is based on the stability of the climate through which we travel. Our built world is more fragile than we think, and it can fail.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday May 16, @11:02AM
Maybe Greenland will once again be green, as it was when the earth was warmer.