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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: 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.