by Russel Norman
A new story suggests that the Amundsen Sea Embayment in Antarctica is melting a lot quicker than anyone previously realised. If it goes, that’s six metres of sea level rise apparently. From The Australian:
“Surprisingly rapid changes” were occurring in the Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea Embayment, which faces the southern Pacific Ocean, polar ice experts said today.
But more study was needed to know how fast it was melting and how much it could cause the sea level to rise, they said.
The warning came in a joint statement issued at the end of a conference of US and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin.
The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that they said were causing warmer waters to flow beneath ice shelves.
The windchange, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability.
The thinning in the 3.2 km-thick ice shelf is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain on the remote ice shelves, they said.
Study is focusing on the Amundsen Sea Embayment because it has been melting quickly and holds enough water to raise world sea levels six metres, the scientists said.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Thu, March 29th, 2007
Tags: environment
More posts by Russel Norman | more about Russel Norman
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
… and as the ice melts and (darker) land appears, the sun’s rays are absorbed rather than reflected by that land … and the warming land releases heat to further warm the sea and the atmosphere above …
Our family is already working out the potential effects and implications of rising sea levels in our chosen area(s) of Aotearoa/NZ … and how these would affect different generations during their lifetimes.
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I hasten to add that, in addition, our family is taking very seriously the minimisation of (and/or compensation for) any possible contributions we may be making towards this warming effect.
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Utter rubbish!
The sea is NOT going to rise by six meters, this is so typical of the scare mongering approach from the Greens.
Please stop telling lies.
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Ye canny change the laws of physics.
Six meters? Round the earth? How much water is that, then?
The whole of Greenland would contribute 6 meters+, but would take over 1500 years to melt.
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The whole WAIS or the whole of Greenland, but the ice needn’t MELT to contribute, all it has to do is fall into the glass (slide off of the land) to cause the liquid to overflow… this is a serious issue for the WAIS but I had not heard ’til now of any issues in the Amundsen Sea.
It occurs to me that someone may have their units wrong somewhere and I have been unable to find any reference to this… yet. Just the article.
It’s a damned lot of Ice though.
respectfully
BJ
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Got it.
Their “6 meters” is from the WAIS… Amundsen Sea is basically part of the ice structure keeping it from falling in. When the Amundsen Sea Ice goes (and it looks like it will) the WAIS will start falling in in an accelerated glacial flow, a decade or so to really collapse and how much and how completely and how fast it falls into the ocean is a lot of unknowns and not-understoods. That it can and will looks quite real in terms of the sub-ice-sheet cores that have been taken.
This is one of the risks NOT ASSESSED by the IPCC because not enough is known about the ice flows.
respectfully
BJ
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http://www.ig.utexas.edu/research/projects/agasea/
http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0292.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17853364/
There’s more but it is basically about the WAIS falling into the ocean and I would be far more conservative in my estimation of worst case effects. There is real risk here and it is not trivial, but it isn’t 6 meters in an afternoon either.
The press, in this case the Australian, has a tendency to bollix details in an effort to make eye-catching headlines.
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/annex6.pdf
http://www.glaciologia.cl/textos/vaughan.pdf
respectfully
BJ
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I think one has to tread very carefully here; Is it 6 meters per hr. or per wk. or mnth. or annum or what! If the the source is the Press then that may explain the confusion!
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Drakula
There is no “confusion”. This estimated “six metre” rise in sea level is presumably the estimated volume of ice currently under study in (and on) that part of Antarctica and its environs, melting … and that melt-water flowing into the sea.
Let’s not forget that the same scenario is happening in the entire Antarctic and Arctic as well … faster than previously anticipated.
There are other research estimates from other studies: “5 metres”, “8 metres total for both poles”, etc etc.
The reality is that it IS happening … That it seems that it will accelerate, and that it WILL impact on our coasts … and that it will impact on many low lying countries with huge human populations … not to mention other species. (The polar bears are already one very sad example.)
It will also impact on our climate and our weather … and …
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The links that bj provided are really useful for throwing more light on it.
This one – http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/annex6.pdf – was pretty useful in trying to model the costs. I like their comment that a one metre sea level rise is twice as costly as a half metre sea level rise, but a five metre sea level rise is much much more than five times more expensive than a one metre sea level rise.
Lots of coastal areas would have to be abandoned if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet slid into the water after the Amundsen Sea Embayment broke up (along with some of the other ice sheets that that are holding the WAIS in place) and we got 5-6m sea level rise.
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Drakula – I am not confused. The Australian is confused, and confusing, but if you poke through the links you will see the situation…
Fundamentally the WAIS is a marine ice sheet. It is kilometers thick and its base is BELOW sea level. It is not “floating” but it has a real capacity to slide into the ocean quickly (in geologic terms). How quickly is subject to a great deal of speculation, but 6 meters is ALL of it, and geologic time is not-in-my-lifetime or my children’s … rapid WAIS collapse is 20mm per year or so of sea-level change. No tidal waves. Enough to be a nasty adaptation problem though as it will be coupled with a LOT of other changes.
http://www.hopkins.k12.mn.us/pages/high/courses/online/astro/course_documents/earth_moon/earth/seasons/rythyms/effect_global_warming.htm
respectfully
BJ
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eredwen , the sky is not falling. Even if it did melt, and that’s a big “if” (which no one is actually really suggesting, except some excitable journalists) our great grand-children will all be long dead by that time.
Probably done in by a genetically engineered virus…
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You may not worry about the conditions you leave to your great grand-children PEL, we actually do.
BJ
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And guess what, our great grand-children will find it hilarious that we could have been so dumb to have been taken in by two great cons in less than 7 years, Y2K and Global warming.
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Y2K was fixed before it broke anything – preventative engineering and it worked. Of course nothing happened… we FIXED it and having seen what had to be fixed it was a very good thing we did. Now, because we didn’t let Y2K happen and it didn’t hurt us you want us to let AGW happen?
I hope my great grand-children are able to have a sense of humour about how dumb great grandpa was about this. If I am wrong they’ll be able to do that.
If YOU are wrong there’s an excellent chance they won’t live long enough… and you’re betting against almost all of the real climate science and scientists on record… AND the insurance industry.
Sorry, I don’t like your odds and I have seen a lot of the information you’re relying on.
respectfully
BJ
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I worked on Y2K, and most of it was simply luck. We really had no idea which way it would go until the clocks ticked over.
Turned out there wasn’t much to worry about. A lot of the hype was coming from computer service companies, one of whom I worked for. Helped their bottom line, though, and I imagine Gore has realised much the same convenient truth.
Scare the sh*t out of people, they’ll give you stuff. Classic Rove, now being used by the left.
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BJ: “You may not worry about the conditions you leave to your great grand-children PEL, we actually do.”
Dunno. Maybe it’s time to give the dolphins a turn.
The monkeys are pesky creatures
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PEL – I worked on it in places you likely did not. Embedded SW – and a few things I saw could EASILY have brought disaster to someone. The community isn’t a large one, but it is significant enough. Was more done than was necessary? Yeah… and I expect some folks padded the accounts a bit heavily… but don’t try to pass it off as “no problem”. There WERE problems, problems that could’ve brought down planes and put ships on rocks. Wouldn’t have ended civilization as we know it either, even at its worst. Just would’ve cost some lives and some money. Not in the same class of trouble as Global Warming.
As for the human species, it happens to be the one I am part of, and whatever else happens I’m in there pitching for US, not dolphins or monkeys or cockroaches. Not that I don’t care for them, but I am motivated by a moral imperative relating to survival of the human species. It’s the nearest thing I have to religion so arguing against it is as futile as arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness… more futile ’tis likely.
respectfully
BJ
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Jeez PEL, what kind of bonzo outfit did you work for?
I was involved with the Yellow Pages web site/directories among others, we did extensive testing, made a major version change of its Oracle database, and modified a lot of code. We were confident it would go without a hitch, and guess what… it did. There is no doubt at all that it would have ground to a halt without our diligence.
Another program I worked on in France, monitoring temperature and power in a nuclear power station, in the late 1980s — the assessment we made in 1998 was that it wasn’t going to make it, the basic software used was too old to be adapted to 4 figure years etc… so it was abandoned and replaced in good time. The consequences of that one suddenly not working could have been pretty serious — it was responsible for setting off alarms in the control room in conditions of overheating.
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BJ
Don’t you see? When Big Bruv doesn’t understand a problem, it’s automatically a hoax: no attempt is made to understand it. It’s so much simpler that way
I was also involved in Y2K fixing, including a few interventions after 2000. Some software just fails miserably if the date goes backwards, and it’s not good when your airline booking system/database/BIOS can’t figure out the date.
Peter: this was more than luck. Critical systems globally were tested and patched extensively, so most issues found post-Y2k were just annoyances (which some commentators, like Robert X Cringely, predicted in advance). You could argue that too much money was spent dealing with Y2K, but it’s a bit like saying “why do we spend so much on crime prevention when crime levels are so low?”
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This is the real danger
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/science/20070329TDY01001.htm
though IMHO they don’t quite have the numbers right.
The population of humans on this planet WILL fall… the only question at issue is the method by which Dr Malthus will have his revenge.
respectfully
BJ
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And just so everyone has a point of comparison, Venice has sunk at about 0.5mm per annum historically, reaching 1mm per annum over the last 50 years.
This one part of the global warming trends could see every coastal city and town in the world sink twenty times as fast as Venice. With a few more optimistic projections the world may only sink at two or four times the rate of Venice.
Yea, it’s not tidal waves, but it is patches of road around here underwater at high tide in my lifetime and every beach gone under. It’s not like NZ can build dikes around it’s entire coastline.
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Thanks bj for providing the links I`ve just been reading some of them. I don`t profess to be an expert in this field at all but what amazes me is 18 ft of water X by the entire surface of the worlds oceans, isn`t` that nearly 2/3 rds of the earths surface? Thats a hell of a lot of water!
Maybe the science bofs on this blog could enlighten me : When water is heated does it not expand? Is that not Boyles law? Because if that is the case then global warming will increase the water levels quite significantly.
What do you all think of that?
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The expansion of water due to warming is counted in the expected sea level rise calculated/predicted by the IPCC.
Boyles law is one of the gas laws. Not related to ocean volume, but you are correct the warming does in general, increase the volume/decrease the density… there is a notable and critical exception between 0 and 5 degrees Celsius… which is why ice floats on the surface.
respectfully
BJ
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>>Jeez PEL, what kind of bonzo outfit did you work for?
Various in Europe. PriceWaterhouse, IBM…..
Few people knew what was going to happen to happen at system/board level. You simply had to take the manufacturers word for it, and very few were claiming compliance to the point where they would guarantee it.
Most systems on 31 December weren’t certified. That is a fact.
Not saying that all year 2K work was redundant.
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Thanks bj I appreciate that information. I guess in laymen terms it`s like filling a bowl of water right to the rim and droping a small lump of ice in it.
As I mentioned on one of the other blogs that in the early nineties I read “A Matter of Survival” by David Suzuki and he predicted similar scenario`s but he put it in such simple analogies and I think that is what gave him such wide acceptance.I would like to update my reading, can anyone suggest a good book on this subject?
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PEL : Many systems weren’t certified, but I really don’t know what you’re talking about at “system/board level”. It’s the simplest thing in the world to roll the date forward and see if stuff still works… and that is what everybody did. Even unsupported and undocumented systems were empirically tested in this way, and amended or discarded accordingly. Anyone who genuinely didn’t know whether their system was going to work or not on 1/1/2000 just hadn’t done their job properly.
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Sydney had an hour long voluntary blackout last night to raise awareness of climate change:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6509437.stm
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>>It’s the simplest thing in the world to roll the date forward and see if stuff still works
No it isn’t. We’re not talking basic web servers and some directory application that you can take offline.
Try doing it with a real time trading settlements system that works across different time zones with hooks into every legacy banking system imaginable.
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Peter
Even if this real-time trading settlement system couldn’t be tested, it wouldn’t constitute most systems. Most sizeable companies knew how their systems would cope with Y2K as they had been tested to death.
If by “system/board level” you’re referring to the OS and hardware, enterprise system vendors (including IBM) were happy to certify their systems with software and firmware patches where necessary. Systems that couldn’t be made compliant due to their age had to be upgraded or replaced.
Not saying that all year 2K work was redundant.
There’s no pleasing you, is there?
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If you worked on Y2K you’ll be aware that each manufacturer/vendor would certify they’d done due diligence on a certain product.
What few could do was certify entire systems, consisting of software, hardware, network infrastructure, patching and routing. Across town, country continents and time zones. Each of those systems patched and configured in different ways by different customers, over many years.
There’s no convincing some people. I worked on it. I know what I saw.
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Peter
Is it fair to summarise your position as this: you acknowledge that some Y2K work was necessary, you personally had to do work on it, at the time you couldn’t say for sure whether it was enough, but you agree with Big Bruv’s opinion that it was all a hoax?
(genuinely confused…)
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theres no confusion, PEL has been caught out as being not as knowledgeable as he pretends and now hes squirming on a hook
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Not exactly — it’s worse than that. He undoubtedly knows his stuff, he’s been trying to obfuscate — baffle the layman with bullsh*t — in order to offer support to Bro’s populist contrarian position, which he himself knows to be a load of cr*p.
Not a good look Petie.
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Yawn
72 percent of US schools did not do Y2K work. No failures.
Russia, China and Italy did very little Y2K work. No failures.
See also: http://tinyurl.com/2j8gf8
The problem was overestimated. “Compliance” was limited. It really should have been dealt with on a fix on fail basis.
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US schools run Windows PCs, what’s to fail? What are the consequences if something fails? Who actually reports if something fails? More obfuscation from Pete.
“Fix on fail basis”… fine. All IT people on call 1st January… until further notice… all air traffic control, power stations, traffic lights, stock exchanges etc. on holiday until it works again… sounds like a plan to me!
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Sensational news about climate change : the Sheep Albedo Effect
The already-reeling “consensus” supposedly linking climate change to CO2 is about to receive its final coup-de-grace from a remarkable new result announced in a press conference today by Dr. Ewe Noh-Watt of the New Zealand Institute of Veterinary Climatology
[...]
The hypothesis begins with the simple observation that most sheep are white, and therefore have a higher albedo than the land on which they typically graze (see figure below). This effect is confirmed by the recent Sheep Radiation Budget Experiment. The next step in the chain of logic is to note that the sheep population of New Zealand has plummeted in recent years. The resulting decrease in albedo leads to an increase in absorbed Solar radiation, thus warming the planet.
Read the whole story on the very serious RealClimate blog.
(sorry, it’s still 1st April over here in Europe)
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Y2K is history as far as I`m concerned. I like to keep to the original topic here which is rising water levels something I percieve as a very real threat in the future. It seem Big Bruv has de-railed us somewhat.
As the WAIS is anticipated to slide into the ocean, Bj compares it`s area to that of Greenland. That may be correct, but some people may veiw Greenland on the Mercators projection.I don`t mean to nit- pick here.
Drakula
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Off cource when the ice on Greenland slides into the ocean and global warming has rendered that land fertile again, it will leave vast tracks of land for humans to inhabit. Like my Viking ancestors did not that many centuries ago.
How much land will there be under the WAIS and with global warming will ir become habitable.
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Drakula – The effects of collapse are similar, and GIS may move some ice into the ocean at the same time as WAIS… which isn’t going to be good. The combined total is IIRC about 12-15 meters with plenty of room for error, but the rates combined are the thing we have to watch as it would be centuries before you migh see either of them substantially depleted.
If you are interested in the totals for each you can google for the estimates, but IMHO the estimates are misleading at best. It just doesn’t move all at once.
My personal expectation (based on the human propensity for using hammers to clean plate-glass-windows *which appear as nails needing hammering to some of the more delusional among us), is that global warming will ultimately not be a big problem owing to the nuclear winter and that our better-armed-than-fed situation is likely to provoke.
If we avoid that through some miracle, and I give us only a 1 in 3 chance of managing it at best, the adaptation will have SOME time to occur. Not a lot. We will not be able (in general) to preserve things the way they do in Venice. Wellington could manage with a couple of Dikes and some locks to let the ships in and out, but it’d be damned risky engineering in an earthquake zone.
Not computed either, is the effect of the change of shape of the geoid due to the unloading of all that ice into the ocean. The springback of the planet surface when relieved of all that mass is apt to be considerable and will toss some of the navigation solutions into perennial recalculation, will affect satellite orbits and will likely unlock deep locked faultlines and permit movement of the planet crust in ways we are not accustomed to seeing, with the resulting additional earthquakes and vulcanism.
There’s a LOT of trouble in having this going on without having to have a tidal wave.
ciao
BJ
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Gerrit – WAIS is substantially grounded below the surface of the ocean, a marine ice-sheet. Only melting in other parts of Antarctica will free up usable land surface. It probably will, but it will still be kinda cold down there… and dark half the year too. respectfully
BJ
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Gerritt,
As a quick comparison: “East Antarctica has a landmass of approximately the size of Australia, and West Antarctica is a collection of islands … ”
Presumably, those estimates would be made using currrent global sea levels ?
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# Gerrit Says:
>Off cource when the ice on Greenland slides into the ocean and global warming has rendered that land fertile again, it will leave vast tracks of land for humans to inhabit. Like my Viking ancestors did not that many centuries ago.
Vikings only inhabited about 1% of Greenland, none of which has since been covered by ice cap. The ice cap that is on Greenland now has been there for tens of thousands of years, and most of the rest of Greenland is bare rock.
Actually those particular Vikings are unlikely to be your ancestors as they are believed to have died out, leaving no descendants. According to Jared Diamond (in his book Collapse), they died out largely because they used up all the nutrients in the soil. There is an alternative view which says that it was the 1-2 degree drop in temperature that was fatal, but the archaeological evidence is clear that there was serious soil depletion, whether or not it was that that finished them off.
Soil depletion tends to be a big problem in sugh latitudes, because the soil is very thin to begin with. This is because (1) low light levels lead to plants growing very slowly, making the process of soil formation very slow, and (2) land at high latitudes has spent a lot of time under ice caps, when it cannot form any soil at all.
therefore I really wouldn’t count on any great agricultural expansion in Greenland any time soon.
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Kahikates,
They left family behind in Norway, am descendant from the ones to timid to make the journey.
What you are forgetting is the global warming effect. What will the temperatures be in Greenland? Peeople scatch out an existence in the very north of Scotland and Iceland, will the temperatures be similar.
Cant wait to go to Greenland. Those pure spring waters from the melting ice will feed the rivers with pristine water, the ground will grow the wheat to make an excellent single malt whisky. That would be paradise!
Going to stake my claim right now based on ancesteral occupation. My land under that ice. Want a job as chief distiller?
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BJ,
But with global warming BJ how cold?
Lets see it from a glass half full perspective. Going to get a big old tanker and load up with fresh water from the melting ice to sell to the people desperately short of the stuff.
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Gerrit
As somebody who has lived in the north east of Scotland I can tell you the they do far more than “scratch out” an existence, the place is magnificent.
What a pity that global warming is a con, the north of Scotland would be even better if the temp went up a little in the winter.
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We may do that for a while… but you have to get that tanker from here to there without using a load of go-juice. We may actually be able to export water… it surely rains enough in parts of this country that the outflow at the bottom of some of our rivers could, after being used to generate a bunch of kilowatts be loaded onto a tanker and be shipped to Oz. If the water is clear of effluent of course (a dubious aspect of real world considerations here in NZ).
Oz however, is upwind of us. I believe it is still viable with some interesting variations of design of such tankers but it ain’t a gimme, and dealing with the ice you want to transport isn’t any picnic either. Easier to move it as ice than as water in some ways, but none of these answers have yet made anyone any money.
As for how cold a nuclear winter would be in the face of global warming it is hard to guess. Who did what to who and how much of it winds up in the atmosphere altering our albedo and our thermal equations, how much of civilization survives to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere… how many people survive at all… the change in insolation due to such an event is expected to be more potent than the CO2 by a large margin, but it is also expected to precipitate out in a couple of years. The question is whether it is sufficient to drive the climate over the tipping point into another ice-age. The feedbacks are available but nobody has ever modeled anything like this AFAIK. The real-world experiment has never been done before either (that we know of) and I am not real keen to see it done.
OTOH, I am here on record as expecting my children or their children to have that very misfortune.
respectfully
BJ
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BB,
Irrespecitive if you think it is a con or not, there are going to be opportunities to have a lot of fun as well.
Best protection to ensure the survival of the fittest is to do what my ancestors did, go a vikinging.
A bnch of modern long ships, family and a a bunch of stout men and their families, that will be a blast.
Now where to lay my hands on some decent weaponary. mmmmmmm, stinger missiles, 50 cals, m16′s.
The tribes are stirring.
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On a serious note though how will civilisation react?
Back to basic on Maslow’s levels of heirachy?
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Gerrit
Well tell your ancestors to take their greedy eyes of Scotland, the jocks own all the oil left in the North sea and I can tell you for a fact that we Scottish are not giving that up without a fight.
P.S, I bet my stingers are bigger than your stingers.
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It’s not the size that counts it is who fires the first shot. Dont want oil, have a commodity much more valuable to make. Single Malt Whisky.
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So where in the north east did you live? which years? I’m fae Aberdeen and I left in 85.
But BB, Gerrit said far north of Scotland, not the north-east which is course prime-farm land.
I’m with Kat on the likelihood of agriculture on Greenland, temperature rise and defrosting not-withstanding. Having read Collapse as well, the case is made pretty clear that topsoil is the key, that the Viking settlers completely trashed the topsoil of Iceland and Greenland when they arrived, and that some parts of the world just do not have the capability for “western” agriculture (e.g. Iceland, outback Australia).
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PEL, that is the best you can do to back up your thesis that Y2K was a con? That is so lame! It’s written in 1999 for goodness sake, not to mention the fact that it is a 1 page opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review written by an economics professor.
If you can find a detailed study published in an academic journal by a computer science professor some time after 2000 that argues that Y2K was a con, then I’ll start listening to you.
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stuey
I worked in Aberdeen for almost a year but lived in Forfar, yes I know thats not quite the far north but lets face it as far as the English are concerned the far north starts at the Watford gap!
Ye canne beat a bra bridie or a smokey fae Arbroath.
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Cant wait to go to Greenland.
You might meet some cousins there, among the Inuit. Apparently they finished off the struggling surviving Vikings, and it would be surprising if they didn’t spare a few of the women…
Survival of the fittest, that’s the brave new world awaiting us.
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BJ, when you talk about nuclear winter, have you integrated the fact that we simply don’t have the mass of thermonuclear weapons we had in the Good Old Days?
Both Russia and the US have greatly reduced their arsenals. Most of the fissile material has been burned in reactors.
Seriously, are you aware of any recent work on the effects of full scale nuclear war? The old stuff is no longer applicable.
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Interestingly enough the indigenous peoples of the world are in the best position to survive in the globally warmed world as they have retained theit tribal structures. From within these tribal structures they will be better enabled to organise their people to survive and prosper.
“Western” civilisation will break down into tribal structures before re-population of the world will start again.
Now which was that Maori tribe that my Viking ancestors visited sooo long ago.
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Still on the serious not, this article fron the Wall Street Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009804
contains the following quote
“Even James Hansen, a scientist who began issuing warning cries about global warming in the 1980s and is a top adviser to Mr. Gore, concedes that his work may hold “imperfections” and “technical flaws.” Other flaws are more serious, such as Mr. Gore’s depiction of sea level rises of up to 20 feet, which would cause Florida and New York City to sink below the surface.
Sober scientists privately say such claims are exaggerated. They point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that released its fourth report on global warming last month. While it found humans were the main cause of recent global warming, the report also indicated it was a very slow-moving process. On sea levels, the U.N. panel reported its s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. The new high-end best estimate is less than half the previous prediction, which was still far below Mr. Gore’s 20 feet. Similarly, the new report shows that the panel’s 2001 report overestimated the human influence on climate change since the Industrial Revolution by at least one-third.”
Could somebody, anybody at all make a definitive statement on how high the sea levels will rise and over what period? There is a huge difference between 3ft (1 metre) and 6 metres.
Answer, No not really.
Question, Should I be worried, Maybe not.
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Gerrit – The links I provided above can tell you about sea level rise… what they don’t tell you is about ground water depletion, excess rainfall here and drought there, failure of harvests and hungry people with lots of guns and bombs. Few things are as wasteful as the US concept of foreign aid, entailing as it does air-freighting of large quantities of expensive compounds in elaborate packaging to remote villages for massive and dangerous fireworks displays. The number of people killed at these displays is unfortunate. What happens when the wheat belt turns to dust?
respectfully
BJ
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Problem is BJ, who to believe?
As one scenario is descibed, another one paints a different picture. I guess it depends how fearful one is about change.
Me I love it. Exposes our civilisation to much need structural changes and to a more sustainable future. As I have said before 3/4 of the world is uninhabited and underutilised.
Wheat fields have turned to dust in Australia without undue effect to the world wheat market it would seem. Pity the farmers though.
If I recall the American mid west turned ito a dust bowl sometime around the 1920′s. Did it recover?
We can all fight change but at some point one has to roll with the punches and make decisions on “this is what I have got, now let me explore the possibilites open to us all”.
Such as making fresh water using nothing but the sun, a black plastic sheet, and condensation formed under the black plastic. I only have to leave my clear plastic sails laying on the grass for a few minutes under the sun for fresh water moisture to form under the sail. You cant destroy water. It is everywhere for free.
If we have fog we can harvest the water in it by erecting mesh screens to trap the water and funnel it down to a reservoir. Seen this done in the Andes where there was daily sea fog but never any rain. Enough water was collected on the screens to fulfill the needs of a town of 10,000. Including crop irregation. Screens looked pretty long and big but from a visual point of view where no worse then wind power generators and most of the day they were shrouded in fog anyway.
God, I’m exited by the future.
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alistair
“BJ, when you talk about nuclear winter, have you integrated the fact that we simply don’t have the mass of thermonuclear weapons we had in the Good Old Days?”
Major reductions, yes. Still a mass. these guys seem to have done their homework on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_and_USSR_nuclear_stockpiles.svg
probably around 30,000 warheads averaging at 0.5 Mt each. Thats down from 60-70,000 in the 80′s, but half an apocalypse is still an apocalypse.
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Tomo is right I looked up in google and it said that the US had 30,000 warheads around the world I assume thats not counting the US itself.It`s still immoral and unacceptable. I am reading `Count Downton Crisis’ by K.R.Timmerman. It`s about the rise of the new bogeyman nuclear Iran, 20 years ago it was communism. It`s well documented as evidence of `terrorist’ activity but it is baised so far the book hasn`t addressed as to why Islam is angry with the US and we all know it`s the displacement of the Palistinians.I feel a solution here would be to avoid a very real nuclear confrontation. If a nuclear war breaks out it really would stuff up the Earths
climatic patterns. Is the cold war over?
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The bombs exist still, the danger exists still, the complacency is new and IMHO misplaced.
respectfully
BJ
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