Forum Post: Something BIG happening in CO2 this year!
Posted 8 years ago on April 17, 2016, 10:09 a.m. EST by factsrfun
(8342)
from Phoenix, AZ
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_weekly_mlo.pdf
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
Here is a great story with excellent links from FiveThrityEight:
Global warming is ususally described by average global temperature rise, but that to the average person doesn't ring. I mean like if it is two degrees hotter or cooler on any particular day, I couldn't tell. And say to the average bird or cat or tree, I bet they couldn't tell either.
I'm sure it is imprortant though. Maybe if the smart scientists could translate it into something we common folk, birds, and trees could understand; something like how many hot days over 95F (as in the temperture when many plants stop growing,) or how many fewer cold days under 32F ( as when water no longer freezes.) That I could relate to as I know there will be so many more or so many fewer days when something will or will no longer happen. That can make the whole global warming thing suddenly real to not only me, but also to them global warming non-believers out there who don't understand hi-fi NASA or rather NOAA science.
I'm still not sure how our cities will flood when the Arctic ice cap melts away. ??? I mean like the frozen water at the ice cap is already floating. Maybe realistic descriptions as to what actually happens ( I'm sure a lot of bad will happen, I just don't think shoreside towns will actually flood,) that would help too.
A new dark age looms but global and local consciousness is rising and can usher in the new bright age at the same time. It will depend on what we do with our globally accessible local, regional, and global information. Knowledge will be needed and so will wisdom.
1) ice above the waterline - like sitting on land - melting - will "then" enter the ocean and the "current" water table will rise.
2) loss of glaciers - means the loss of potable water for millions. Think Syrian refugees are a problem now? It is a drop in the bucket compared to the water-less refugees of tomorrow.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/PolarIce/polar_ice2.php
Meltwater - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater
Meltwater is the water released by ... Meltwater provides drinking water for a large ... the world population being affected by the loss of glaciers, ...
Ice above the waterline is still Ice sitting on water. Its weight is already displacing the water surrounding it. So when it melts the water level does not rise.
Apparently you missed this = "like sitting on land"
So ice sitting on land is not ice that has already displaced ocean water.
Let us do a little math here: Most of the ice sitting on land is in Anartica (about 6.4m cu miles worth according to google), and a little is on Greenland (about .7m cu miles), and some trival amounts in glaciers and on mountain tops around the rest of the world. Considering the volume of water in the worlds oceans is about 320m cu miles, the amount of water in the form of ice on land is about 2%. So, being that the area of the worlds oceans is about 140m sq miles that makes the average ocean depth about 2miles deep. Add 2 % to that, and that is about 200ft. ... Err, yeks! I'm moving to higher ground.
www.underground.com has WunderMap showing contours. Picking the contour line upland from 200' will give you 240 feet above sea level which is almost what both you and DK reckoned to be the maximal sea-level rise if all of nature's snow and ice melts. It will take many decades to "move" closer to the seashore naturally but nature helps those who have foresights, mostly from science.
Science suffers from a potentially fatal flaw when we are dealing with a one-up event such as anthropenic climate change. By the time that we can truly measure the frying of the Earth beyond the statistical incomprehension of the masses, we are fried. The Koch's so-called scientific approach to the Earth needs multiple Earths for experimentation. Hmm, let us fry one by continuing to accelerate the greenhouse effect. Then replicate the result with another one before thinking about countermeasures. Hopefully, we have stayed on the Earth that was not fried. It's absurd!
Nobody is ever killed by their fatal accident because it's NOT a fatal accident if that body has not been killed ALREADY and if that body has been killed ALREADY the fatality of the accident cannot have been the cause for having the body killed because the body can never be killed twice.
Sounds like the fallacy existing in modern risk theory that people use to justify things like nuclear reactors; small liklihoods off set large consequences therefore making risks small. Nevertheless even small risks do happen, and if the consequences cannot be afforded.....
We should build for resiliency instead of accepting epsilon times infinity as the worst possible outcome. Fukushima and Chernobyl meltdowns are forever (generating more carbon dust).
Claude E. Shannon predicted that even extremely reliable communication systems can be built out of unreliable components if sufficient redundancy is built in. I believe that we can build very resilient systems, too, if we put in the effort.
The different components need to be corralled properly and separated from each other like so many plutonium pucks. If need be, chopping them up small enough and separating the pieces will definitely prevent them from colluding to start yet another chain reaction to meltdown -- little feedback, little feedforward, no chain possible.
This sounds very much like an antitrust approach. We already have the antitrust laws for a long time, having lived through great pains before to gain the gems of experience. Why weren't the laws enforced after the systemic dangers from the Great Recession had abated? Was it due to God, Mond, Sux on the geoduck?
Which is why - the rule of thumb "should be" plan/engineer/build for the worst possible circumstance - because the worst absolutely can and will happen.
Don't underestimate the importance of "the trivial amounts in glaciers and on mountain tops around the rest of the world" for the sustenance of human lives. Look at a map of the population density around the world and where the water that sustains the peoples comes from. Imagine not having the icy mountain-top reservoirs (glaciers) storing water for year-round use. People, we may have a problem. Can we really do fine without water for months?
Mentioning that possibility, can Brooklyn and Queens really do that? Does Mayor de Blasio realize what risk he is taking on for New York, New York? What's the contingency plan?
Very good point. And realisticallly the possibility of losing those "trival amounts of water" (from the standpoint of ocean rise), would happen much sooner than the antarctic polar cap completely melting away. And that would indeed mean many people around the world would be starving of fresh water. I wonder if somebody made a calculation yet on how much temperature rise for how long to make that happen?
Nature's made a calculation for us and decided to give us a "dry run" (materialized within two years after the decision) at Vietnam's rice basket, the Mekong delta: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/04/21/vietnams-mekong-delta-hit-worst-drought-90-years/83231314/
The good news there is that upstream countries are building more dams to hold water so some runoff will be captured. The bad news is that the drought at the delta will be exacerbated even more, together with saltwater intrusion and subsidence of the land due to insufficient sediment. If Arizona and California could nearly come to blows over water rights, different traditionally adversarial countries without mediation can become inflammatory in the future.
It's a bit like Hurricane Irene hitting the Hudson River valley before Superstorm Sandy's arrival, a good early warning.
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Together, Greenland and Antarctica contain about 75% of the world's fresh water, enough to raise sea level by over 75 meters, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/PolarIce/polar_ice2.php
1 meter = 3.28 feet
3.28 x 75 = 246
Sounds like NASA factored in the "trival amounts," but considering the south pole is minus twenty something below zero year around, it would take more than a few degrees to temp rise to realize a total melt of the southern cap. Basically, we'll fry before we drown.
I would like to see the figures for total glacial melt outside of the arctic zones as that will happen 1st - how much water will that add to sea level rise - but also how many millions of people will be left without a steady source of fresh water. Think the number of Syrian war refugees is a huge problem now? Wait until the water-less refugees.
Plus I feel the NASA predictions as well as everyone Else's may well be too conservative as I don't think any have a real handle on what methane is gonna add to the situation as the permafrost thaws. This methane problem - as far as I know - has not even been looked into as to the amounts of methane gushing into the atmosphere from active as well as abandoned fossil fuel well-heads - thousands of these in the USA alone.
The arctic warms the fastest. When the arctic tundra's permafrost warms, it will release both methane and carbon dioxide due to the melting of the clathrates and the biological activities of the microbes on the organic material. There is a vast amount of arctic tundra in the biggest landmasses on Earth: Alaska, Northern Canada, and Russia/Siberia. As the methane and carbon dioxide trap heat, the arctic warming will accelerate. This is a positive feedback loop which may be rather negative in some sense.
The gushing of methane from fossil fuel heads has the profit incentive to capture and sell the gas but very few of these capturings will likely occur in the arctic north because the climate is hostile and the pipelines will be long to get the gas to where the users are.
As compared to the antarctic? Perhaps so. But I think in the temperate zones - that they warm faster than either arctic zone - so complete loss of glaciers in inhabited lands will happen sooner than total loss of ice at either pole.
Any summer now (probably within ten years?), we will be seeing an ice-free arctic ocean. The glaciers in inhabited lands are high up so they can stay cold longer than near-sea-level arctic ice or tundra. The higher one goes, the colder it gets in general. No one, aside from mountain climbers, climate scientists, etc., really cares much about the glaciers aside from their meltwater.
The smaller glaciers have already disappeared, are disappearing, or will disappear but the really massive ones in the Himalayas will stay around far longer than the arctic ocean becoming ice-free in summer.
Hhmmmm I would like to see something to support that conjecture - but - say that you are correct and the Himalayas will still have glaciers - does that mean that they will still provide melt water for those who depend on it or does that mean that useful melt water will end prior to the complete loss of the glaciers - because of the cold at that altitude for them to survive longer than polar ice?
Commercial interests have already been planning for shipping through the fabled Northwest Passage. Russia staked claim to the North Pole by planting its flag there at the ocean bottom. Canada may set up toll booths once traffic picks up enough.
Yeah - it will be done peacefully - HAH Probably see some attempt to divide the area by hemisphere. If anyone feels like negotiating on a fair basis.
If 'New Amsterdam values' are to prevail, it will be done peacefully. New Amsterdam (now New York) was born of the failed attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient through the Hudson River.
Although it was somewhat stranded, New Amsterdam was strategically located. Its peaceful surrender by the Dutch to the English set the stage for the growth of one of the greatest metropoles of the world, with eventual water routes from New York to reach the Great Lakes, the Delaware, the vast Mississippi valley to New Orleans and the far West. It gained continental reach and significance - not bad at all for the failures as well as the surrender to 'New York values'. Otherwise, we might not even have had the Roosevelts and the New Deal.
Negotiating on a just basis can build the foundation for enduring peace leading to prosperity for all. The opening of the fabled Northwest Passage is the dream of past centuries, let us not squander its blessings by squabbling.
The problem for people is really how fast the glaciers change relative to how fast people can cope. How useful meltwater is depends on where it is. If the glaciers in a watershed have disappeared, when it rains, it floods, and when it doesn't rain, it's drought - not good for agriculture to feed people. It can be truly scary if the rains just decide to move elsewhere, like in Venezuela perhaps.
Venezuela's government blames the lack of water to generate electricity on El Niño. People blame the government for mismanagement. It's ironic that they have the greatest proven reserve of oil in the world and it could be the burning of fossil fuel that was causing the rain pattern to move.
I don't know how anyone can think that burning a resource (that took millions upon millions of years to accumulate) in just a couple of hundred years would be a good thing.
Immediate gain trumps future pains. It's not a problem until almost everyone emulates the high-energy consumption pattern.
Thank you for stating that. http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110645/why-does-ice-melting-not-change-the-water-level-in-a-container
Spring has arrived about two weeks earlier than a decade ago to the Northeastern U.S. Listen to the birds and they shall teach thee.
Ah yes. That is the sort of data that is needed.
I suppose non-believers do not listen to birds.
If the non-believers live near where the birds congregate, they can still hear the horny male birds calling for mates or chasing after the females. The love birds put their eggs in the same basket so if they get the season's start wrong, they may face starvation for their entire family.
The human equivalent is the property and crop insurance companies. Their profits come from predicting the future and managing risks. They have very strong incentive to get their predictions correct. Read the annual reports of casualty loss insurance companies for how climate change is affecting their profits and losses.
Going forward, we can go back to Aristotle's conceptual framework for the material world of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. They're more integrative than the 92 natural chemical elements so they form a better basis for thinking about macroscopic flows. Life is electric fire burning slowly in water so we need fuel/food, oxidant, electrolytes, water, enclosing and separating (membrane) structures, and proper temperature range for life. Life is akin to a wet fuel cell (it's certainly possible and operable on many other worlds).
For extremely short duration ahead predictions, www.wunderground.com can help a lot. One can use it to predict whether there will be frost on the car windshield in the morning that will require time to be defrosted or scrapped off, when to leave the office from work to avoid the blizzard that will start within the next 15 minutes, whether to squirt and scrub the car with soapy water so the rain coming in the next 15 minutes will rinse it clean, whether to drive the long way around (use topographic information on WunderMap) to avoid hills so one's car does not get stuck climbing up hills in a snow blizzard, when to switch on the dehumidifier when relative humidity is at maximum (usually around 4a.m. to sunrise) using the cheapest, least environmentally polluting (nuclear powered electricity yields very little ADDITIONAL pollutant) electricity for efficient drying, etc. Imagination combined with knowledge can make life convenient and a piece of cake.
There are also realtime online traffic information and construction alerts often put out by the state that can help one avoid getting into a traffic jam or re-route one's path.
lol