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Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start
- jstanley 9y agoHow many times have we heard this story before?
- prodmerc 9y agoClearly, it needs a bit more repeating for the English speaking oafs.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoAmusingly, this comment could be taken as an argument both for and against this story.
- vocatus_gate 9y agoI just came back from 7 months on one of the U.S. research stations, doing network engineering and glacier search and rescue. It was pretty interesting to see how fast the glacier face the station was near was retreating each year. edit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_have_a_lot_of_time_but_network/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_ha...
- chronic7ui 9y agoIs Antarctica melting? Yes. Is it bad? Yes. Are humans accelerating it? Yes. Is it bad for my kids and future generations? Yes. Does that mean I'm going to switch to an EV, start taking public transportation in Mountain View, or stop using disposable bags at While Foods? No. Scientists have a long way to convince the billions of people on Earth like me before anyone is going to meaningfully reduce climate change.
- mc32 9y agoI'm not sure why people are downvoting the above comment. Many people think the same way and we have a long way to convince people that their attitudes and behavior need to be modified --both here _and_ in the developing world. It's likely more acute in the developing world since their governments have fewer resources to dedicate to the issue so the populous is on their own to modify behavior and attitudes. Ignoring this issue (that this kind of attitude exists) just compounds the problem. We need to work knowing people think this way and keep that in mind when developing policy.
- Jare 9y agoI'm not sure it is possible to convince someone who has all the facts and still doesn't give a fuck. Only new facts will do the trick, facts which, even if not adding to the body of knowledge, have a high fuck giving factor. Like, a tornado destroys their house or such.
- mc32 9y agoI think, like with many things, you have to work with the early adopters, then the bulk and finally the stragglers and at that point you can deal with the hard-core holdouts (or work around them). The key is acknowledging this phenomenon and taking it into account so that policies cane be more successful.
- Judgmentality 9y agoI think the issue is making an emotional connection to the facts. I don't believe any person has the emotional bandwidth to care about every problem in the world.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Only new facts will do the trick It's not about information. > Like, a tornado destroys their house or such. That's more like it. In other words, until something is personal people have a very hard time relating to it, no matter how irrefutably true it is.
- 9y ago
- idibidiartists 9y agoTrump is President. Amazon buying Whole Foods. Antartica is melting. London Burning. Corals dying. Bees dying. North Korea. Putin. Etc. WTF is going on... Elect Elon Musk as President in 2020 and let's all go to Mars (Not!) So many assholes in charge. And the people of this planet are in diametric opposition to each other. Feel free to down vote this on the basis that it is absolutely and utterly useless to state all that is wrong and offer no solutions. I just happen to think that we need more of stating what is wrong. I don't think it has sunk in yet.
- GrumpyNl 9y agoBees are not dying, we are doing better this year than last year here in Holland:)
- beatpanda 9y agoYes they are. People keep conflating the ability of commercial bee keepers to keep up with colony collapse with the ability of wild bee populations to survive. They are not the same thing. I don't know about the Netherlands specifically but iirc neonicotinoid pesticides are banned throughout the EU. Maybe wild bees are doing better there. But overall things are not getting better.
- johansch 9y agoDon't forget Australia and Canada. Both massive co2 polluters per capita (even worse than the US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous... I have noticed a pattern. Anglo-saxon countries are killing us. Unfortunately they are also the primary users of this platform, so good luck seeing this message!
- zzzzzzzza 9y agoThose are all just headlines. In reality the world is getting better (for humans).
- bcook 9y agoI'm no historian but isn't the sky always falling according to some highly respected sources? I mean, yeah, let's always work towards fixing problems but is the end really near? Edit: I'm unsure why the parent comment is now flagged.
- prodmerc 9y agoAs long as my golf courses in Florida are OK, there is no global warming. A bunch of floating ice can't raise sea levels, since the ice is already there, it's just moving around. It's big ice, yes, but it won't do anything and certainly won't reach the US, hence it will not affect it. Those damn state leaders aligning with the commie Europeans on the issue don't know a thing, they're going rogue. I tell you what, they will regret this, the federal government and the American people won't stand for this.
- idibidiartists 9y agoThis is a joke, right? Warm water occupies more volume than cold water. Also, ice that is on LAND and running off into the OCEAN will raise sea level. Also water from melting ice caps that evaporates goes back into the ocean and refreezing on polar caps is slowing down, so more water in the ocean. It does not have to melt straight into the ocean. Sea level is rising due to ice melting. It is a fact.
- lostlogin 9y agoJudging by the references I think it's supposed to be said in a Trumpian tone.
- sctb 9y agoWould you please not post unsubstantive inflammation (aka troll) like this?
- prodmerc 9y agoSorry, spent too much time reading Trump.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- celestialcheese 9y agoWow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and research in the last couple years are good for non-scientists about the effects of rising oceans on socio-economics and politics?
- Consultant32452 9y agoIt will be hard to find anything that isn't exceedingly one-sided if socio-economics and politics are involved. One thing to remember when you read that stuff is that the poorest are the ones that suffer the most from the regulations we put in place. For example, I support taxation on any product or service with externalities where it's nearly impossible to price the damage done into the product naturally. Pollution is a perfect example of this. I buy oil from you, but third parties are harmed. Therefore somehow I need to pay a tax and compensate everyone I'm harming. Anyways... who do you think this tax will harm the most? The billionaire oil barons? Of course not. They will still be billionaires. It's the poorest who need cheap fuel so they don't freeze to death in the winter. If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get up to the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution can't be worse than the problem for poor people.
- CuriousSkeptic 9y agoDistributing the revenue from said taxes back as a public dividend should solve that problem nicely. Since we're all impacted by those externalities a public dividend is only fair. And since the distributed money compensate for increased costs the tax can be pretty high, and thus effective in directing money towards alternate solutions.
- tmpdude01 9y agoIn 2014 Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reach... But now in 2017 we're talking about continent-wide collapse?
- sambull 9y agoSea ice comes and goes. Land ice is much more important. There is an acceleration on land ice loss. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/
- tmpdude01 9y agoThere's a NASA study from 2015 that concludes that mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet are greater than the losses: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
- sambull 9y agoZwally's study is in-line with the GRACE data, and loss of land ice mass. "According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008." GRACE shows acceleration since 2008. Zwally's study uses data from 1992-2001, 2003-2008. And is in-line with the net-gain slowing down in his data-set.
- mturmon 9y agoThis misleading comment cherry picks one particular study to suggest a conclusion that is probably not true. The commenter started out talking about sea ice, and when (rightly) that was noted to be irrelevant, switched to a different press release. The linked study (Zwally et al.) uses satellite radar altimetry (ICESat) to measure height of Antarctic ice, and thereby quantify mass losses. Other studies use satellite-derived gravity (GRACE) to get more directly at mass changes. They conflict. One possible reason (among several) for the discrepancy is that the overall height of Antarctica is also changing as it rebounds from ice loss in the distant past, i.e., some of the height increase seen by Zwally et al. is due not to ice increases, but to inter-ice-age rebound of the continent beneath the ice. More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/11/05/a-controversial-nasa-study-says-antarctica-is-gaining-ice-heres-why-you-should-stay-skeptical/?utm_term=.86898c732394 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
- Pulcinella 9y agoThe greed of those already dead will kill us all.
- rhino369 9y agoWe should start angling for the contracts to build the seawalls that big cities are going to need over the next 50 years.
- lostlogin 9y agoAnd there's way more to it than that. Waste water will have to be pumped out of storm water systems rather than flowing. Salt enters ground water and causes changes. Things like underground car parks become problematic. Rivers don't flow the same and may need gates to keep high tides and storm surges out. The flow changes cause silting and river travel can be affected. Storm surges should be handled by your wall, but they are terrifying for low lying areas.
- mkagenius 9y agoThis topic is an open ended debate. How will we reach to a conclusion? Certainly more research is a way..
- theprop 9y ago"Chinese hoax"!
- nonbel 9y agoI've found the coverage of this Larsen C rift to be disquieting since I read that the people studying it don't link the event to climate change: >"The team say they have no evidence to link the growth of this rift, and the eventual calving, to climate change." https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.h... It seems that everyone in the media or commenting on the internet suddenly knows better than the experts on this topic.
- wavefunction 9y agoAll they said was that they don't have evidence for a link, which may be because there is no link, there is a link but they haven't found the evidence yet, or a link was never within the scope of their study. You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."
- nonbel 9y ago>'You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the "don't link the event to climate change."' No I am not. But by default I would assume all such events (really every event on earth) are somehow linked to climate change... it is exceptional to me that they claim to have no evidence for this. Edit: Isn't it interesting that everyone except them (who are the apparent experts here) seems to have no problem linking it with climate change, including me?
- DennisP 9y agoThis comes up a lot in climate discussions. There's a record hurricane or heat wave, but these things happen randomly so there's no way to say definitively that one particular event would not have happened without climate change. But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes and hotter heat waves. In the same way, we know smoking causes lung cancer, but if you're a smoker who gets lung cancer, nobody can say for sure that the smoking caused it, because some nonsmokers get lung cancer too. They just don't get it as often.
- theprop 9y agoYes, it is melting and some of the before/after photographs are the most devastating evidence. There are some famous photos of Patagonia 100 years ago and today...anyone remember them? I managed to find these before/after photos of glaciers in Alaska. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Global-warming-s-effects-glaciers-revealed-Amazing-shots-disappearing-ice-past-125-years.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Globa...
- theprop 9y agoLaunch many satellites into space which have huge reflective screens to bounce away some 1% of the light that would otherwise reach Earth. I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with his rockets.
- surferbayarea 9y agoUS leads the world in per capita emissions. And people on the coasts(ny/sf) are the worst offenders. Guess who will history hold responsible.
- johndevor 9y agoUS is also one of the countries best situated to solve the problem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jhpriestley 9y agoCalifornia and New York have the lowest per capita CO2 emissions except for DC according to https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/ https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/ Wyoming, North Dakota have the most.
- girmad 9y agoCould ice shelves breaking off accelerate the rate with which methane hydrocarbons are launched into the atmoshpere?
- trophycase 9y agoThe real problem here is businesses who are causing this are externalizing their costs to everyone else. So I have to buy an expensive EV, I have to willingly pay more for energy, I must willingly inconvenience myself to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. Until we make those who are causing this pay the real costs, we will never see any meaningful change. The worst part is also that those countries that choose not to have any restrictions will inevitably move ahead, economically, of those that do and slowly weaken those that do have restrictions. The only real solution to this problem is complete collapse or ubiquitous market forces that make the environmental choice also the best fiscal choice.
- merpnderp 9y agoHow is it even possible to talk about recent acceleration in melting without mentioning the abnormally large el Nino we just had? Because it would imply the acceleration was temporary.
- Dylan16807 9y agoSo is billions of dollars enough to dam these channels and bottleneck the melt?
- microwavecamera 9y agoWell lucky for us global warming is a Chinese hoax. Nothing to see here, move along citizen.
- Tomminn 9y agoSome perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year [1] of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical acceleration, we aren't losing antarctica any time soon. [1]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar... [2]https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm
- Tomminn 9y agoSome perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometer of ice per year [1], of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical acceleration, we aren't losing antartica any time soon. [1]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar... [2]https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm