Greenland: Icebergs Melting

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Greenspan....Greenspun...Greenland...I think i'm detecting a pattern here...

 

[Eagle43]

Sounds like junk science to me.

I mean these fools wizards even want to turn down olympic flame for goodness sake. Just to honor the Kyoto Treaty, of course. 

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

In the back of his latest book, Michael Chrichton suggests that global warming is only an abberation of data. If I understand the argument, limited data before 1900 (once available on-line but which has been purged since) show that the 19th century was warmer and that the lower temps used for a base-line for global warming were a dip, so temperature rises we see are possibly just noise in the signal. He likens global warming to eugenics, a pop-sci trendy mistake also of the turn of the 19th century and early 20th.

When we lived in Houston a few years ago, there was a little article about some 100-year-old newspapers found in an attic in Galveston. The agricultural news talked about crops that can no longer grow in that part of Texas--because it is now too cold. (I do not remember the details. Any Houstonian trivialists out there?)

I do remember a Nova that explained that for 90% of the last 100,000 years, Europe was under a mile of ice. Maybe we are warning up. How would I know?

Another Nova on the subject of global warming showed that the solar constant seems to have been increasing steadily over the last 150 years by about 1%. Not much we can do about that.

If it really gets to be a problem, we could put a big aluminized mylar umbrella out at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the sun and reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth just enough to cool us down a trifle. By the way, I just learned that we have a satellite at L1 now: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite (SOHO).

I figure we are in greater danger from major earthquakes such as The Big One coming to the Pacific Northwest one day or The Big One coming to California, or a repeat of the biggest earthquake in recorded US history on the New Madrid fault in Missouri. My favorite geological disaster to worry about is the big pluton pushing up under Lake Yellowstone that will give us a supervolcano one day...real soon now. (OK, I heard it subsided a little recently. Go back to sleep.) Another reason to be interested in moving to the cone of South America, no?

I am going back to worrying about escaping debt before retirement.

El Gitano

[Hey! I just cracked 200! Eats dryer sheets for breakfast, now is it?]

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Junk science and greater threats that we cant do anything about?

How about back to the thesis that maybe pumping crap into our air and water isnt a good thing and we should do something about that, since we can and theres a direct connection between polluted air and water and our health.

If it happens that global warming is true, then we're doing something about that problem at the same time.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

Isaak Asimov was interviewed by Bill Moyers on a show on great thinkers. Ike was a blob, not very charismatic at all. However, when asked what the greatest problem mankind faces, he said simply, the population bomb. If we can't control our population, everything is a waste, all progress we make will eventually be negated. Everything will turn to ****.

Moyers went on to pick a charismatic poet from his subjects and turned it into another series on Myth and how it was so important to mankind.

Ya gotta look good for the cameras.

 

[Cut-Throat]

Global warming is real. Too many smart scientists have studied the problem and have come to the same conclusions. The naysayers are in the corner bar and on the Rush Limbaugh show.

This reminds me of the Tobacco arguments of the 1960's. It's still hard to prove that smoking causes cancer, but even the doubters have mostly quit.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Dont be so sure. My wife gives breathing treatments to people with emphysema and lung cancer, et al, and a half hour later they're outside smoking. She's reassured daily by many of these folks that there is absolutely no connection between smoking and lung disease or cancer. Just cuz.

Oh well, it keeps her in a job...

 

[Dreamer]

60 Minutes just had a segment on this tonight. It doesn't look or sound that good. You could actually hear the icebergs melting.

Dreamer

 

[maddythebeagle]

Too many smart scientists have studied the problem and have come to the same conclusions.

I dont think that is the case. Ok, they agree that there is a "greenhouse effect". You know, if we had no atmosphere, our planet would be bitchen cold. All the rest per "Waterworld" and the "Day After Tomorrow" is more just theories to get more funding and print.

 

[AltaRed]

Folks need to read up on the warm period about 1000 AD. Vikings from Norway were growing grapes for wine off Canada's east coast in Newfoundland... a place that cannot grow hardly anything today because of the short growing season. They finally had to give up many years later when the climate cooled... medieval times in Europe were a cold spell.

So, yes, global warming is with us. Still coming out of the last ice age. Is it warming faster than it normally would because of the greenhouse effect? Probably... Is that a bad thing? No one knows. I personally think people worry about all the wrong things. Yes, it is important to maintain clean living as much as is practical to save the environment, but to cry wolf is downright silly.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I can see why a canadian would encourage global warming

 

[wabmester]

I noticed the title of this thread is "icebergs melting." Icebergs melting would have no effect on sea level. Just as ice cubes melting in your water don't cause water to slosh over the sides. (Of course, land-based glaciers are another matter....)

 

[laurence]

Hmm, yes, but it's my understanding that the icebergs/floating iceshelfs that birth the icebergs are acting like a cork. Once they are gone the land based ice can flow quickly (for a glacier) into the sea.

Global warming concerns me, but the desertification of Africa and the burning of the Amazon concern me more. Sheesh, I'm going to bed.

 

[cube_rat]

I noticed the title of this thread is "icebergs melting." Icebergs melting would have no effect on sea level. Just as ice cubes melting in your water don't cause water to slosh over the sides. (Of course, land-based glaciers are another matter....)

Great callout, wab. I meant glaciers not bergs.

 

[REWahoo]

Whether or not you think "global warming" is man-made, man-enhanced or simply nature doing what nature does, it appears climate change is going to hit us all in the wallet. From Consumer Reports:

Higher insurance premiums: Blame climate change?

Coming soon to your mailbox: higher bills for home and auto insurance, larger deductibles, and more restrictions, courtesy of global climate change. That's the conclusion of a recent report commissioned by Ceres, a coalition of institutional investors and environmental groups in the U.S. and Europe. "Insurance as we know it is threatened by a perfect storm of rising weather events," says Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres.

The report found that insured losses from weather-related disasters in the U.S. have increased 15-fold in the last 30 years, more than at any other time on record. Losses from natural disasters have outpaced population growth and inflation, so they can't be attributed solely to people who have placed themselves and their property in harm's way. International climate experts envision more, and more-severe disturbances, including windstorms, hailstorms, and droughts.

You may soon feel the effect, if you haven't already. The report predicts that insurance will become less available and less affordable as the costs of disasters challenge insurers' ability to pay... The gradual transfer of risk back to consumers and governments in the form of higher premiums, higher deductibles, and government-backed high-risk pools is likely, the report said. Insurance shortages also may occur: After 2004's hurricane season, seven insurers stopped writing new policies in Florida. In the long run, if private insurers can't cover the risks and operate profitably, the government may have to help, as it does with the National Flood Insurance Program, and that might boost taxes.

Swiss Re and some other European re-insurers (they insure insurance companies) regard climate change as a fact and are incorporating it into risk analyses used to design policies and set premiums. They're already planning to hike some premiums in 2006, which may show up in your property-insurance bills.

Yet U.S.-based insurers have been slow to acknowledge climate change. In December 2005, 20 institutional investors representing $800 billion in assets sent a letter urging 30 of the largest publicly held insurance companies in North America to disclose their financial exposure from climate change and steps they're taking to reduce it. The investors included two of the nation's largest public pension funds, as well as state treasurers and comptrollers from eight states and New York City. The investors are concerned that climate change could affect the value of stocks and bonds issued by insurers and held by pension funds.

The Ceres report was to be discussed in fall 2005 at a conference in New Orleans. Katrina foiled that plan.

 

[Nords]

Global warming is real. Too many smart scientists have studied the problem and have come to the same conclusions. The naysayers are in the corner bar and on the Rush Limbaugh show.

I'm not denying the existence of global warming.

I object to being asked to pay tremendous sums of taxpayer dollars to "combat" something that is based on conjecturable science with dubious "solutions".

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

Did the news get below the 49th parallel? Last year, the Russians opened negotiations with Canada to use Churchill, Manitoba, as a year-round port. (Churchill is the famous polar bear tourist town.) True.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Well, when the insurance companies start factoring it in to premiums, somethings up...