Originally Posted by herbal tee

And that is the point. We are seeing the theoretical turn into the actual. Islands are being lost, glaciers are permanently disappearing.

Yes, yes. And puppies are dying. But of the three, only the middle one isn't clearly related to something other than 'anthropogenic global warming'.

(and 'permanent' is a pretty irrational word to use. glaciers come and go -- always have)

The NY Times report that As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising

While base sea levels are rising world wide (though not accelerating as much as models have predicted) it seems that the land is rising faster than the sea in the Juneau area.

The continents float on a sea of magma. With glaciers melting at 30 feet a year, the local land mass is getting lighter, and thus the land level is rising... and the land is rising faster than the sea. It's a significant effect, apparently, enough that one person is considering putting another nine holes on his golf course. Greenland is showing a similar effect.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

The NY Times report that As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising

While base sea levels are rising world wide (though not accelerating as much as models have predicted) it seems that the land is rising faster than the sea in the Juneau area.

The continents float on a sea of magma. With glaciers melting at 30 feet a year, the local land mass is getting lighter, and thus the land level is rising... and the land is rising faster than the sea. It's a significant effect, apparently, enough that one person is considering putting another nine holes on his golf course. Greenland is showing a similar effect.

Hudson Bay is shrinking for the same reason, iirc. The end of the last ice age saw a whole heck of a lot of mass lifted off the nortn american continental plate.

I wonder how much (if any) overall sea level rise might be due to the water being pushed out of old features like that. A quick peek gave rise rates of 1cm/yr(). That's quite a bit of water having to find a new home.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Hudson Bay is shrinking for the same reason, iirc. The end of the last ice age saw a whole heck of a lot of mass lifted off the nortn american continental plate.

I wonder how much (if any) overall sea level rise might be due to the water being pushed out of old features like that. A quick peek gave rise rates of 1cm/yr(). That's quite a bit of water having to find a new home.

I'm involved is a surreal end of the real estate world. You have no idea how funny we think this is. The POSSIBILITIES!!! THE JUSTICE!!! THE PAIN AND DISLOCATION!!! THERE IS A GOD!!!

CNet is reporting a new rechargeable battery design that uses oxygen from the air as one of the reacting elements, replacing part of the bulk of the battery. The result could well become cheaper and less bulky than current batteries. This might be what is needed for electric cars and might help store electric power from intermittent energy sources such as wind or tides.

Still well out in the future, but perhaps a piece of the puzzle.

CNet reports MIT experts tackle nuclear power waste problem

Some academic pro nuclear types advocate fission as part of the solution. Seriously addressing waste storage is necessary.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

CNet reports MIT experts tackle nuclear power waste problem

Some academic pro nuclear types advocate fission as part of the solution. Seriously addressing waste storage is necessary.

Morons. Or at least, corrupt bastards.

There's no waste 'problem', unless you make one. Waste is only an issue if you refuse to reprocess. The USA is literally the only nuclear-power user on Earth that for some reason rejects reprocessing out of hand.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Morons. Or at least, corrupt bastards.

There's no waste 'problem', unless you make one. Waste is only an issue if you refuse to reprocess. The USA is literally the only nuclear-power user on Earth that for some reason rejects reprocessing out of hand.

H-m-m-m. You suffer from thinking ahead of the current problem. People are not convinced that nuclear power is necessary, so any action that involves nuclear technology receives a resounding 'NO'. It's the same reaction that the voters in California just gave to their budget crisis.

When reality finally intrudes, and the need for nuclear power is accepted, then solutions can be discussed - much like the taxes that will have to increase in California. No one wants to believe the unpleasant, but believing is better than living the unacceptable.

First, we have to get there.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

There's no waste 'problem', unless you make one.

Well of course, the waste problem is a political problem, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have real consequences.

Waste is only an issue if you refuse to reprocess.

Waste is not a technical problem regardless of whether you choose to reprocess or not.

The USA is literally the only nuclear-power user on Earth that for some reason rejects reprocessing out of hand.

Which is precisely why waste is a problem. It's the same as the problem of the Gitmo detainees.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Argentine glacier advances despite global warming

I read somewhere that the glaicer on Mt. Shasta is growing as well -- as a result of the northern Pacific warming causing more precipitation in the northern Sierras and southern Cascades. Mt Shasta is high enough that the added precipitation is going to fall mostly as snow regardless of the most dire forecasts of global warming. Could this not be the case for the Argentine glacier as well?

Originally Posted by The Rani

That makes no sense to me whatsoever. Lake Shasta is dry as a bone, and the snowpack in the Sierras has been way down the last few years.

USA Today reports that Glaciers on California's Mt. Shasta keep growing. For snark purposes only...

Warmer temperatures have cut the number of glaciers at Montana's Glacier National Park from 150 to 26 since 1850, and some scientists project there will be none left within 25 to 30 years. The timeline for the storied snows at Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro is even shorter, while the ice fields of Patagonia in Argentina and Chile also are retreating.

It's a different story at Mt. Shasta, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range that is about 270 miles north of San Francisco.

Scientists say a warming Pacific Ocean means more moist air sweeping over far Northern California. Because of Shasta's location and 14,162-foot elevation, the precipitation is falling as snow, adding to the mass of the mountain's glaciers.

"It's a bit of an anomaly that they are growing, but it's not to be unexpected," said Ed Josberger, a glaciologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Wash., who is currently studying retreating glaciers in Alaska and the northern Cascades of Washington.

Historical weather records show Mt. Shasta has received 17% more precipitation in the last 110 years. The glaciers have soaked up the snowfall and have been adding more snow than is lost through summer melting.

The additional snowfall has been enough to overcome a 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature in the last century, according to a 2003 analysis by Tulaczyk, who led a team studying Shasta's glaciers.

Originally Posted by The Rani

A warming Pacific sweeping moist air over northern California, eh?

California’s Drought Update - May 29, 2009

Many droughts come an go over a period of a few seasons or years. A few years ago, the Old South was in dire drought conditions. Florida, Georgia and the Federal Government were involved in severe discussions about water allocation on certain rivers. If one looks at the NOAA Drought home page, today the Old South east of the Mississippi River is showing absolutely clean.

The advance and retreat of glaciers is measured on a different time scale. The USA Today article talks about 100 year averages. The Rani is invoking a yearly report. Of course there are going to be conflicts.

The Current California drought should be taken seriously. With the sun due to come out of a solar minimum, the current conditions are more likely than not to change over the next few years. Still, while the Shasta glaciers are growing, said glaciers are just about alone. The Colorado River is not providing as much water as the ever growing population would wish. In the long term, California and the southwest has a problem.

At the same time, north costal California in the area near Mount Shasta is about the only area in California not listed as in a drought condition. There have been enough storms in early 2009 that Lake Shasta's levels are coming up, but continued above average rain would be needed to get the lake up to its normal levels.

I do not see the low level of Lake Shasta this year conflicts with the long term growth of the nearby glacier over periods of decades.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Ho hum ...

Yes. There is short term variability as well as a long term trend. No conflict.

Originally Posted by The Rani

I see lots of conflicts. But if you close your eyes, they disappear. Amazing!

The data has a hundred year trend of increased glaciers on Mt Shasta, and a two year drought in Lake Shasta. Three years ago there was more rainfall in the Lake Shasta area than the lake could hold. I wouldn't doubt that the last two years saw a short term decrease in glacier area, but that would be considered to be noise when one is looking at long term trends.

That's the data. I don't close my eyes to the data. Droughts come and go.

But I'm trying to make sense of what Rani is saying. Because the short term trend bucks the long term trend one throws out all the data associated with the long term trend???

Krugman of the NY Times talks about Betraying the Planet. Nothing very new here, but he uses really strong language against "denial."

Originally Posted by The Rani

That's kinda funny, cuz I made a comment about raping the planet one time and Mikebert called me a "tree-hugger," meaning some kind of far-left semi-lunatic.

Tree hugger isn't some sort of far left semi-lunatic. A tree hugger is an environmentalist, some who sees environmental issues as equally or more important than other issues like the economy or foreign policy. Although many tree-huggers have leftist policies not all of them do.

Very sobering program from last year:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/

This is still the biggest issue of our time, and we don't have much of it (time, that is). Glaciers that bring water to half the world's people have receeded about 60%. Global heat is setting records, and mostly in the last 30 years. Fires and droughts are increasing. Life in the oceans is dying. The arctic ice cap may be gone by 2020. Once climate change has passed a certain point, it can't be reversed. We have about 10 years to reverse course. Once the tipping point is reached, our planet will become unliveable without a massive die-off of humans and others.

Meanwhile China builds at least 1 new coal-burning plant every week. More new cars than ever are put on the road all over the world. America has the largest conveyor belt in the world: 50% of all rail traffic in America is hauling coal from Wyoming to points east and south. Entrenched corporate and government power supports it. Libertarians and Republicans and superstitious wackos support it, with their justifications for not acting, or by believing and peddling lies about the cause of global warming. There are even some folks who continue to deny global warming is even happening at all.

We need to ask our representatives to get busy and pass a strong new climate change law. They have been working on it, watering it down, etc. We need cap and trade. We need more investments in green energy. We need a cash for unconverted cars program. We need to shut down the coal and oil companies soon.

In northern CA, my PG&E utility bill now says it only gets 2% of its energy from coal. Renewables are slowly increasing. It can be done.

Heatstroke Nature in an Age of Global Warming by Anthony D. Barnosky

"Warming itself is very likely to cause some of the most dramatic changes. That's what Jack Williams, Steve Jackson, and John kutzbach found when they teamed up to forecast what Earth's ecological future might hold over the next future. Williams and Jackson are paleoecologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wyoming, respectively, in the business of figuring out what past ecological changes mean for the future. Kutzbach, also at Madison, is a climate scientist who has spent a good part of his long career building models to understand the relationships between past, present, and future climates and species. Familiar climates are likely to disappear in many places and novel ones likely to appear, they concluded, causing loss of species and loss of some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. By 'familiar climates,' they mean combinations of temperature, rainfall, and other climatic parameters that characterize at least some part of Earth today; by 'novel climates' they mean combinations of climatic parameters now experienced nowhere on Earth. Of course, there will also be many places where one so-called familiar climate will be replaced by a different familiar climate, with attendant ecological changes."

Under A Green Sky Global Warming, The Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future by Peter D. Ward


Much of the book describes Greenhouse Extinctions.

Describing one such mass extinction:

"...let's go back to near the end of the Triassic period, to the site in Nevada that begins this book.

"No wind in the 120-degree heat, and no trees for shade. There is some vegetation, but it is low, stunted, parched. Of other life, there seems little. A scorpion, a spider, winged flies, and among the roots of the desert vegetation we see the burrows of some sort of small animals-the first mammals, perhaps. The largest creatures anywhere in the landscape are slim, bipedal dinosaurs, of a man's height at most, but they are almost vanishingly rare, and scrawny, obviously starving. The land is a desert in its heat and aridity, but a duneless desert, for there is no wind to build the icononic structures of our Saharas and Kalaharis, The land is a hot barrenness.

"Yet as sepulchral as the land is, it is the sea itself that is most frightening. Waves slowly lap on the quiet shore, slow-motion waves with the consitency gelatin. Most of the shoreline is encrusted with rotting organic matter, silk-like swaths of bacterial slick now putrefying under the blazing sun, while in the nearby shallows mounds of similar mats can be seen growing up toward the sea's surface; they are stromatolites. When animals finally appeared, the stromalites largely disappeared, eaten out of existence by the new, multiplying, and mobile herbivores. But now these bacterial mats are back, outgrowing the few animal mouths that might graze on them.

"Finally, we look out on the surface of the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps. Yet that is not the biggest surprise. From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color-a vast, flat, oily purple, not looking at all like water, not looking like anything of our world. No fish break its surface, no birds or any other kind of flying creatures dip down looking for food. The purple color comes from vast concentrations of floating bacteria, for the oceans of Earth have all become covered with a hundred-foot-thick veneer of purple and green bacterial soup.

"At last there is moting on the sea, yet it is not life, but anti-life. Not far from the fetid shore, a large bubble of gas belches from viscous, oil slick-like surface, and then several more of varying sizes bubble up and noisily pop. The gas emanating from the bubbles is not air, or even methane, the gas that bubbles up from the bottom of swamps-it is hydrogen sulfide, produced by green sulfur bacteria growing amid their purple cousins. There is one final surprise. We look upward, to the sky. High, vastly high overhead there are thin clouds, clouds existing at an altitude far in excess of the highest found on our earth. They exist in a place that changes the very color of the sky itself: we are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. We have gone to the Nevada of 200 million years ago only to arrive under the transparent atmospheric glass of a greenhouse exinction event, and it is poison, heat, and mass extinction that are found in this greenhouse."

At the end of the book, Ward project a similar nightmare in the near future.

Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of our Planet by Donald Prothero

"...all it would take for this huge conveyer belt to be disrupted is something that changes the way the warm currents sink as they reach the northern Atlantic. During the Younger Dryas 11,000 years ago, the gradual melting as the interglacial warmed indeed triggered such a disruption. As the ice caps melted back, they released a gigantic amount of freshwater from the Gulf of St. Lawrence into the North Atlantic as various ice dams collapsed and allowed huge glacial lakes to drain catastrophically. This 'lid' of freshwater shut off the thermohaline conveyer belt for more than a decade as it diverted the warm currents of the Gulf Stream much farther south and prevented their warmth and moisture from reaching the polar regions, which had been warming and melting up to then. The Younger Dryas warming was then interrupted by a rapid increase in glaciation and then a few centuries later by an equally rapid, catastrophic warming when the conveyer belt resumed.

"...the rapid destruction of the Arctic ice sheet is pouring huge amounts of freshwater into the North Atlantic. All it would take is a large-scale release of this water from some reservoir-say, the rapid melting of the Greenland ice cap (which is already happening as I write). Such a scenario is not implausible. Then we would have the worst of all possible scenarios-global warming to superinterglacial greenhouse world, followed by a rapid collapse into another ice age..."

Climate Change What it Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren edited by F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman

"...Most simulations of future climate changes focus on a smooth transition from what scientists call one equilibrium climate to another equilibrium climate-for example, from 280 parts per million CO2 to two times that level. But another future is possible: one of 'rapid, large, and unexpected impacts on local, regional and global scales...take place over decades, which is rapid relative to geological time. The climate record in polar ice cores provides evidence that major climate change can occur in decades or even years...and earth would suffer much fiercer consequences if a 2C (4F) change occurs over a twenty-year period rather than over a two-hundred-year period.

"...Modeling studies have suggested that there will be a significant increase in the frequency of extreme precipitation events and heat waves in an enhanced greenhouse climate...

"...by raising the baseline average temperature, heat waves will become more intense, and the number of days that exceed a given temperature will also grow...The likelihood of heatwaves, such as those that ravaged much of Europe in the summer of 2003 and resulted in over thirty thousand cases of heat prostration, is expected to increase a hundredfold over the next forty years as a result of anthropogenic climate change...."

"...The models do a very poor job of simulating clouds. Clouds are the wild cards, controlling opacity of the atmosphere to light, changing albedo, Earth's reflectivity, but also, if in the right (or for society, in the wrong) place, they act as super greenhouse agents...."

Greenhouse/Climate Change and Australia

Fossil sand dunes of South Australia

Potential Impacts of Climate Change in the United States

Distribution of novel and disappearing climates.