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I saw Chasing Ice at the cinema a couple of weeks ago. I went with friends who study adaptation to climate change in the Arctic communities, and all of them, an

• purephase 14y ago
  Thanks for reminding me. It's been on my to-do list. This video is simply staggering in it's immensity. For the life of me, it is these events that make me seriously question whether the climate change deniers have ulterior motives. The fact that the calving scale has so dramatically increased in the past 10-20 years is terrifying and how anyone can pass it off without concern is beyond me.
  • martinced 14y ago
    What do you mean by "calving scale"? "calving scale" gives about one thousand matches on Google and they don't seem related. I think that the only ulterior motives deniers have is to refuse to face a simple fact: 8 billion people and all the cattle needed to feed them is probably something that earth cannot widthstand for very long. So either we all start eating insects (they are way more environmentally friendly than cattle) or we start limiting birthrate. I know that it is estimated that total world population shall go down by 2100 or so but I'm not sure we can wait that long. One kid per couple. Boom. Problem solved. But who wants to hear that?
    • purephase 14y ago
      Watch the video in parent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_calving http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_calving
    • zaphoyd 14y ago
      I would guess that scale in this context refers to the extent to which the calving happens rather than a specific scale named calving.
    • thesis 14y ago
      It's absolutely not that simple. Try telling a country like Japan (who projects a 30% decrease in population by 2060) couples can only have 1 child.
      • trentlott 14y ago
        First you need couples.
  • VMG 14y ago
    I'm not a denier but I don't find the video particularly impressive. It's massive event from a human perspective, but that doesn't mean anything. The total amount of sea level change from that is probably below 1mm. You also shouldn't expect deniers or people like me, who think that there is little that can be done to prevent climate change, to be impressed by that footage.
    • cryptoz 14y ago
      We're not suggesting that this 4 minute clip alone would be understood or change anyone's perspective. The full length film, showing significantly more than just one large event that happened in less than two hours, is what we're talking about and what is so immensely impactful. Edit: Wait. What? You said you are someone "who think[s] that there is little that can be done to prevent climate change" What makes you think that? Since humans are a leading cause of the existing change, almost by definition we are capable of working to prevent further damage. Sure, it's going to be extraordinarily difficult and near-impossible, but we can do it. Why would you think otherwise?
      • twoodfin 14y ago
        I can't speak for VMG, but: Assume you buy that human emissions are driving enough of climate change that if we removed that driver things would stay "cool enough". China has already markedly surpassed the U.S. as the largest total CO2 emitter, and they're not even close to the U.S.'s per capita emissions. Even if they can manage to continue to industrialize while only emitting per capita as much as the nuclear-heavy French, you're still looking at an increase of 15-20%, and I think that's optimistic. AFAIK, the Chinese are building coal fired power plants as fast as they can. And that's just China. India and Africa would like to enjoy a Western quality of life as well. I am extremely skeptical that CO2 emissions can be substantially curtailed, short of a world economic collapse that would make 2007-2009 look like a walk in the park. But I am more than willing to be convinced. I think it would help the alarmed AGW folks immensely if they would unify around a politically impractical "if we ruled the world" plan. One sufficiently detailed that it could be analyzed for its climatic, economic and social effects, as well as publicized, criticized and modified until it becomes practical. A starting point might be, "Tax fossil fuel extraction at the source at levels sufficient to reduce emissions the necessary N%". But then you have to figure out what to do about the facts that this sort of plan would likely never be accepted by Russia or China, and that it's a massively regressive tax on the world's poor. There are solutions to these issues. Figure them out, add them to the plan, lather, rinse, repeat. If something like this already exists, I haven't seen it.
  • incision 14y ago
    >For the life of me, it is these events that make me seriously question whether the climate change deniers have ulterior motives. I don't follow. I'd think ulterior motives would be all but implicit in any case where there's even a perception of money / power to be gained/lost.
    • sageikosa 14y ago
      I don't deny that climate is changing. But if we're going to pick favorites from nature's children, I think it is in our own best interest to pick mankind. I am not "truly" amazed that people can mentally delete the human population in whole or in part and claim to know what the Earth's climate should be like without mankind (or at least the "unnaturally" large number of them) as if the totality of human existence were an input to a computer model to be optimized for some target value.
    • purephase 14y ago
      Mental laziness is probably best. The common argument is that the costs to curtail are so enormous that it is not worth attempting or that we would be denying quality of life to up-and-coming economies. My point is that it is easier to deny than work towards finding a solution.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    "make me seriously question whether the climate change deniers have ulterior motives" The ones in power do, but the followers accept plenty of concepts because they run contrarian to what various "authorities" state and believe. It follows with plenty of subjects, not just "What do scientists know, anyway?" but plenty of "What does medicine know?" and other fields.
• jessriedel 14y ago
  > my life absolutely must be about working to mitigate and slow global climate change. Any other career path or choice would be so morally wrong I would have great difficultly living with that decision. If you don't value future people, then developing-world health interventions can do more good with your time/money. And if you do, then other x-risks overwhelm climate change.
  • hnriot 14y ago
    Yes, we likely all wont live long enough to see climate change. At the rate bacteria are becoming AB resistant you'll like die from an infection that can't be treated long before the sea levels rise a few millimeters. There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc.
    • cryptoz 14y ago
      > Yes, we likely all wont live long enough to see climate change. This is wildly incorrect. All of us were born after our climate started to change. And the vast majority of us will live to see increasingly bad effects from it. > There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc. We should be solving all these problems simultaneously. Your suggestion that we should not work on fixing our climate problems right now, but that we should wait, is extremely dangerous. The longer we wait and the less we do, the worse it's going to get and the more expensive and difficult it will be to survive.
    • craigching 14y ago
      > There are a lot of problems that we need to look at before climate change, like population control, water management, antibiotics etc etc. Who says some of these aren't related to climate change anyway? As others have pointed out, we need to be working on these problems simultaneously, if we tried to solve them serially there's a good chance none of them get resolved.
      • jessriedel 14y ago
• gd1 14y ago
  Why? It's a glacier. A "river of ice". They flow into the ocean. Calving is what they do ffs.
  • cryptoz 14y ago
    I'm not talking about the 4 minute YouTube clip. I'm talking about the feature film. Why be so angry and swear at me for being concerned at the damage humans are causing to their environment?
    • gd1 14y ago
      I'm sick of the drama. Once upon a time it would have been possible to just watch that video and marvel at the majesty of nature, now we can't have a single natural event these days without you and your cargo-cult mates attributing it to 'climate change'. Add it the list: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
    • guscost 14y ago
      Because the regulations and subsidies that are meant to assuage your concern harm millions of real people (mostly those in poverty), along with the environment. This grasping for the moral high ground is repulsive.
• ChuckMcM 14y ago
  my life absolutely must be about working to mitigate and slow global climate change. Be careful, there are two equally unsupportable view points on climate, one is that the climate isn't changing, and the other is that humans can direct climate change. We know from records, both recent and geological, that the climate will change, we also know there are things well beyond our foreseeable control that can change climate significantly (volcanic activity, asteroid impact, changes in solar activity, earth-solar orbital variations) Invest in surviving change.
  • rdl 14y ago
    Very few people make the argument that climate change isn't happening. The "anti" argument is that it's not due to mankind's activity, but rather a natural cycle, and has changed in the past, will change in the future. The anti position also questions how much the change is happening -- whether it's a 10-20 year spike vs. a 100 year increase, etc. (and, even if you believe in anthropogenic, it's quite reasonable to think there are natural climate cycles going on as well -- just that mankind's involvement is in addition to this and might push outside the normal range) Humans also almost assuredly can change climate, if they want. It's a lot easier to cool vs. warm -- set off a bunch of nuclear weapons (easy, produces nuclear winter, although maybe less so than fearmongered); or, be sane, and put a bunch of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight and thus cool the Earth. I personally think it's probably prudent to try to reduce CO2 emissions, but not drastically. The costs (financial and quality of life) of massive reductions in CO2 now are far higher than the costs to remediate with SO2 or other methods, at least until there's more precise data, the costs of reducing CO2 emissions are reduced, etc. We could probably drop them by a good amount in the developed world, but doing so in China/India/etc. would mean an unreasonable restriction on quality of life for billions of people.
    • scarmig 14y ago
      I'd argue that you're actually pretty inaccurate in your description of what people object to. In reality, people are more than happy to push the line that the climate isn't changing. That's what the line is when Fox News complains that if global warming is happening why is there a big snow storm in January or throws in a snide remark about how the world hasn't gotten warmer since 1998.
• hnriot 14y ago
  This sounds like every Berkeley idealist that eve climbed a tree and grew a beard. While I applaud your interest in working to do some good in the world, I'd suggest digging a little deeper than watching a movie. If you have the skills required there are plenty more beneficial projects you might want to get involved in.
  • cryptoz 14y ago
    Way to be condescending. I collect 160,000 atmospheric measurements per day from smartphones and am working my ass off on projects to assist in gathering data to learn about our weather and climate.
    • Retric 14y ago
      No offence, but that seems really useless. Your not going to get good data from a smartphone in someones pocket or worse there apartment. You could take a cellphone out wait 15 minutes for a good temperature reading and then send that, but that's way to much effort relative to the value of the data which is basically nonexistent. Edit: Ahh, pressure sensor. I had no idea most smartphones had anything like that.
      • cryptoz 14y ago
        No offence taken. Most people think it will be useless. But you are very, very incorrect when you say I'm not going to get good data. I've already got tens of millions of measurements of excellent data. Check out http://pressurenet.cumulonimbus.ca http://pressurenet.cumulonimbus.ca and play around with your local area. Live data goes back about a week, but there's an archive that covers most of 2012. Check out New York City, in late October / early November: Hurricane Sandy. I'm livestreaming the data to Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington. He's got a small team analyzing it to calibrate the sensors and as we grow the network, he'll be using the data to improve weather models and try out new systems of forecasting.
        • scarmig 14y ago
• genwin 14y ago
  When assuming that humans are causing the lion's share of it, among the best things to do is to encourage people to have no more than 2 kids, and for them to share the message.