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My apologies if you read any offense in my words; none was intended. Unless you happen to have a heat ray and a hatred for H20 solids, I can't imagine that you'

by sethrin 13y ago

My apologies if you read any offense in my words; none was intended. Unless you happen to have a heat ray and a hatred for H20 solids, I can't imagine that you've had much of a personal hand in making it melty up here. I hope the data I provided may serve you even if my rhetoric don't.

brownbat 13y ago
Ah, sorry for reading too much into your comment. While I've got you here, and while we're pushing the civil boundaries on the topic, there's something on this subject I'm curious about, but have always been afraid to ask... Won't a more accessible / inhabitable taiga be kind of awesome? I mean, low lying areas without hurricane protection swallowed by the seas, algal blooms, the shutdown of the thermohaline cycle leading to a frozen Europe, midwestern desertification, all these are well down the bad side of the ledger. Harms are still outweighing the good. But isn't some of what's going on up north good for humanity?
- gd1 13y ago
  Nuclear winter, Club of Rome, ozone depletion, acid rain, chicken flu, Y2K, SARS, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together...
- sethrin 13y ago
  I complain about glaciers, but they're really just the tip of the icefield. Most of the ground here is some variety of permanently frozen (permafrost)[0], so that's all going to melt at some point. Most of the population here does not live on/near permafrost, despite that map. However, if you do happen to go to Fairbanks or some more northerly hellhole, you'll find all the buildings are built on stilts, elevated a few feet off the ground. If they were not, the ground underneath would melt and sink (ice is less dense, remember), and eventually you'd be making a nice cross-stitch for "Home Sweet Bog". So there's that. There's no soil in most of Alaska; it's either been scraped away by glaciers or the frozen layer is too close to the surface for much to develop. In some places the pine taproots can only get a meter or so down, and you'll have endless forests of man-high spindly pines. In many other places there are no trees at all. This is generally what we call taiga. When the permafrost underneath this melts, you're not going to have fertile soil left behind, at least not for a really long time. On the plus side, Alaskans are probably not going to complain a whole lot about a warming trend, and the Northwest Passage is finally a thing. Maybe my friend will finally be able to grow avocados? It's hard to come up with a lot of other things that might be beneficial -- maybe we'll have more opportunities for strip mining now that the glaciers are gone. Maybe in a few million years the Alaskan Bog will be a good source of petrochemicals. Really it's pretty hard to come up with good things, especially compared to "most of the ground will melt". Siberia is likely to be much the same story, as well as large parts of Canada -- you can find your own permafrost maps for there. Oh, and we have problems with coastal storms here too, and are already having to relocate whole villages (Newtok, Shishmaref, etc)[1][2]. Probably the only really good thing is that not a lot of people live here now, otherwise it'd be pretty easy to call the Arctic as the region most severely affected by AGW. [0] http://i1109.photobucket.com/albums/h427/m4135/ps9_zps5c9b1bf0.jpg http://i1109.photobucket.com/albums/h427/m4135/ps9_zps5c9b1b... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishmaref,_Alaska http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishmaref,_Alaska [2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/alaska-newtok-climate-change http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/alaska-ne...
  - brownbat 13y ago
    Ah, thanks! I do appreciate the insight here...

by sethrin 13y ago

brownbat 13y ago

Ah, sorry for reading too much into your comment. While I've got you here, and while we're pushing the civil boundaries on the topic, there's something on this subject I'm curious about, but have always been afraid to ask... Won't a more accessible / inhabitable taiga be kind of awesome? I mean, low lying areas without hurricane protection swallowed by the seas, algal blooms, the shutdown of the thermohaline cycle leading to a frozen Europe, midwestern desertification, all these are well down the bad side of the ledger. Harms are still outweighing the good. But isn't some of what's going on up north good for humanity?

gd1 13y ago
Nuclear winter, Club of Rome, ozone depletion, acid rain, chicken flu, Y2K, SARS, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together...
sethrin 13y ago
I complain about glaciers, but they're really just the tip of the icefield. Most of the ground here is some variety of permanently frozen (permafrost)[0], so that's all going to melt at some point. Most of the population here does not live on/near permafrost, despite that map. However, if you do happen to go to Fairbanks or some more northerly hellhole, you'll find all the buildings are built on stilts, elevated a few feet off the ground. If they were not, the ground underneath would melt and sink (ice is less dense, remember), and eventually you'd be making a nice cross-stitch for "Home Sweet Bog". So there's that. There's no soil in most of Alaska; it's either been scraped away by glaciers or the frozen layer is too close to the surface for much to develop. In some places the pine taproots can only get a meter or so down, and you'll have endless forests of man-high spindly pines. In many other places there are no trees at all. This is generally what we call taiga. When the permafrost underneath this melts, you're not going to have fertile soil left behind, at least not for a really long time. On the plus side, Alaskans are probably not going to complain a whole lot about a warming trend, and the Northwest Passage is finally a thing. Maybe my friend will finally be able to grow avocados? It's hard to come up with a lot of other things that might be beneficial -- maybe we'll have more opportunities for strip mining now that the glaciers are gone. Maybe in a few million years the Alaskan Bog will be a good source of petrochemicals. Really it's pretty hard to come up with good things, especially compared to "most of the ground will melt". Siberia is likely to be much the same story, as well as large parts of Canada -- you can find your own permafrost maps for there. Oh, and we have problems with coastal storms here too, and are already having to relocate whole villages (Newtok, Shishmaref, etc)[1][2]. Probably the only really good thing is that not a lot of people live here now, otherwise it'd be pretty easy to call the Arctic as the region most severely affected by AGW. [0] http://i1109.photobucket.com/albums/h427/m4135/ps9_zps5c9b1bf0.jpg http://i1109.photobucket.com/albums/h427/m4135/ps9_zps5c9b1b... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishmaref,_Alaska http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishmaref,_Alaska [2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/alaska-newtok-climate-change http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/alaska-ne...
- brownbat 13y ago
  Ah, thanks! I do appreciate the insight here...