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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, according to new research.
[...] The figures have been published today (Monday, 25 January) by a research team which is the first to carry out a survey of global ice loss using satellite data.
The team, led by the University of Leeds, found that the rate of ice loss from the Earth has increased markedly within the past three decades, from 0.8 trillion tons per year in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons per year by 2017.
Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on.
[...] Lead author Dr. Thomas Slater, a Research Fellow at Leeds' Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling , said: "Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.
[...] The increase in ice loss has been triggered by warming of the atmosphere and oceans, which have warmed by 0.26°C and 0.12°C per decade since the 1980, respectively. The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.
[...] Just over half (58 %) of the ice loss was from the northern hemisphere, and the remainder (42 %) was from the southern hemisphere.
Journal Reference:
Slater, Thomas, Lawrence, Isobel R., Otosaka, Inès N., et al. Review article: Earth's ice imbalance [open], The Cryosphere (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:13AM (16 children)
It is mostly the floating ice that's melting. That doesn't affect sea levels.
Also, the period covered includes Iceberg_B-15 [wikipedia.org]. You can make any curve look steep if you narrow it down and quote the bit with a large step in it.
I don't deny global warming. I am just not sure that it is a bad thing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:47AM (7 children)
The only downside I can see is losing about 50% of the habitable land, mass migration and border conflicts in multiple regions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:54AM (6 children)
But previously uninhabitable land like Canada will become habitable so you can move all the Muslim jihadis there. Earth has a way of balancing things out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:10AM (3 children)
If you think Canada will become habitable before 10,000y have passed, you're delusional. Above the arctic circle there's not enough soil, for starters, to farm.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:25AM (1 child)
@MarieAntoinette says "Let them eat bugs"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:13AM
"Before the bugs eat you alive!"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:02PM
No, not long at all. Look at a satellite map of Lake of the Woods, Canada. Same landforms north of the border as south, but south of the border there's lots of agriculture. With warmer weather and hardy settlers Canada could well accommodate many more people. After all, let's recall that about 10,000 years ago ice sheets covered everything down to about Nebraska. It did not take that long for humans to set up shop after the ice sheet retreated.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:19AM (1 child)
Mmm, living on melting permafrost sounds so much fun.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 29 2021, @09:15PM
Yes, that's the problem with the new Canadian "land" that's going to thaw. It's solid because it's frozen. When melted it becomes a bog.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:47AM (6 children)
>floating ice that's melting. That doesn't affect sea levels
this is false. you know why? because the ice is floating... I'll let you think about that. Still no idea? Let me explain.
salt molar mass: 60g
water molar mass: 20g
salt water molar mass: between those two numbers. think about that.. Still no idea?
salt water is heavier than regular water. That means the frozen iceberg floats higher than it would. melting it adds more space in the water than it displaced in the water while frozen. Think of it this way: the melting is making the water less dense. Take some silly string and unload the whole can into someone's face. How did all that volume fit into the tiny can? Because it was more dense. by making it less dense for the same weight in the can, you've expanded its volume.
Now by how much will it expand the oceans? I dunno, go google it if you care - I don't.
>It is mostly the floating ice that's melting
Oh look, some random retard on the internet says NASA is wrong. I actually don't know if "most" of the ice melting is on land or sea. What I do know, is a shitload of land ice is melting. Because NASA told me so. But you have your theories too, which clearly don't come from science. Tell me, did you drink any hand sanitizer last year? Maybe a Clorox enema or two?
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/ [nasa.gov]
Tell me iceboy, what happens to the seawater fish when that water's not as salty anymore? They die and we find a new source of food to feed 8 billion people? And the hundreds of millions of people who live by the coast - they just lose everything they have worked for, and buy some more land in the newly habitable areas and build new houses? Entire islands full of people - we just relocate those to newly warm Alaska?
It's not a bad thing for humanity as a surviving species. It's one of the worst things that can happen to a person and a family - skyrocketing food prices after losing everything they have.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @08:06AM (5 children)
Not bad, for a 14-year old boy, pretending to be all growed-up on the internet. But completely wrong, in all details.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday January 28 2021, @10:29AM (2 children)
really? I thought 14yo boys were the ones who argue by saying "nuh-huh, you're wrong" and providing no details or any information at all. Have you taken reading class yet? Seems all the scientists got all the details wrong too, since you say so.
https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/20050801_floatingice.html [nsidc.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:53PM (1 child)
For the supposed grown up in the room, every time I see you post you're being an insulting, instigative twat.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Thursday January 28 2021, @07:31PM
Correct. I'm here to get my kicks by laughing at people like you. *gasp* the guy on the receiving end of the insult thinks I'm being insulting. Yeah skippy. That's the point - to be insulting to dumb social rejects. You're my personal clown.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 29 2021, @09:17PM (1 child)
Indeed. Ice is less dense than water. That's why it floats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 31 2021, @06:40PM
He has a very slight point. If you melt freshwater ice and spread it evenly over the saltwater, the level will be very slightly higher than when the ice was floating. The volume of the freshwater is more than the volume of saltwater that the weight of ice would displace.
With mixing the difference is small enough to be irrelevant.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 28 2021, @09:29PM
Global Warming was good when it ended Snowball Earth periods, the last of which may have happened approximately 550 million years ago, and may have helped bring about the Cambrian Explosion. And an end to the last Ice Age, some 10000 years ago, likely accelerated the flowering of civilization.
But the current warming? It's somewhere between bad and very, very, very bad. First, it's much too fast. It's as if between Goldilock's first and second spoonful of Baby Bear's porridge, the temperature went from just right to burning hot. We're perhaps the most adaptable and resourceful animal on the planet, able to use clothes to survive in all kinds of harsh environments our naked bodies cannot tolerate, and able to make and use all sorts of ingenious machines to make our lives easier, yet this change is so fast that even we are going to have trouble keeping up.
We are far more dependent upon other life than is generally appreciated. For instance, it's no good our being able to make and use A/C for ourselves, when we cannot extend that to the crops and farm animals that need the current mild temps. If things keep on as they are, we will have no choice but to move everything to cooler locations-- higher ground, and closer to the poles. It may already be too late to change course. We're talking mass migration. You must realize that as our political organization stands now, no worldwide supreme authority and a fragile community that, though they have avoided nuclear war thus far, may find themselves unbearably tempted, such a wrenching change cannot possibly be accomplished without conflict. Are the Russians just going to welcome to Siberia, with open arms, a billion Chinese and Indian migrants? But let's suppose they did, and Canada too helped out. There still may not be enough for all.
But even these scenarios are much too rosy. More likely is that nations will all find themselves helplessly caught up in the storm. A billion desperate, hungry people on the move are not going to be stopped by anything as pitiful as respect for a national border. There's plenty of blame to go around, too. This is not just the fault of Big Oil. Capitalism itself can be faulted, for inspiring such foolish, short term greed and thinking. The Western lifestyle is another highly likely target of blame. Just being a citizen of the US may mark you for death. Government inaction and timidity is another problem. Extremely cowardly to deny, in the face of all evidence, that a bad problem is a problem or is bad, and sell the public on the comforting, Panglossian vision that everything is great. Or worse, to cynically blame it all on some other group of people. It's going to be chaos. I read that a few of the super-rich are building themselves bunkers in which they hope to be able to ride out "the Event". Folly!
Now, you are probably thinking that it won't be anything near that bad. I hope you're right. There are still things we can do, now, to head off that grim future.