WatchYou're going to be seeing headlines on this in about two weeks. That's when I'm guessing the arctic ice melt will reach an all time record and most of the arctic ocean will be free of ice and navigable.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
The blue starts in 1979. The more red the line, the more recent the year. (dark red is 2011) Each horizontal line is 1 million sq. kilometers. When the graph reaches the bottom, the north pole is completely melted. x-axis is day of the year.
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iwog says
So if AGW is inevitable, why all the AGW-related politics? Is it just to give noogies to Team Republican members?
"Everyone talks about Global Warming, but nobody does anything about it."
-- Mark Twain
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Where is that Mark Twain quote from?
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kentm says
You mean you never heard of Mark Twain's famous quote, "everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it"?
The "modified quote" was a cheeky application of Mark Twain's quote to AGW.
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marcus says
But, artificial life forms ? They are another story.
If life happens a lot in this galaxy, and if it often gets far more advanced than we are, then there may be some incredible artificial forms of life out there. Maybe by now, they actually run things. Maybe we are just a farm of "organics" because we and our clones can be very useful for certain tasks the machines can't easily do on their own.
And Iwog. Not to worry, our true overlords (the machines) will be weaning us off of fossil fuels soon.
The farm may serve other purposes. MY guess is that when the AI life forms get really advanced, watching the organics evolve is one of the most fascinating things there is. It's sort of a way for them to get in touch with their roots.
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marcus says
Sounds like those "Matrix" movies.
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marcus says
In general I agree with this. However, for thousands of years and perhaps sense the dawn of man people have been predicting the eminent destruction of the world. In the past the mechanism for prediction has been religion which has a terrible record for accurately predicting the future.
Science on the other hand does a good job a predicting the future, and is predicting the possibility that the "big issues" of our life time may end up in the destruction of the world as we know it.
This is more than just our ego.
marcus says
I agree in the possibility of other communication is the reason for the great silence, but to be pessimistic the deadly probes scenario is actually a very valid scenario and does not require civilizations to self-destruct on their own.
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marcus says
Except for one paranoid xenophobic life form... *e-hem* deadly probes *e-hem*...
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freak80 says
All the AGW politics arise from the fact that AGW is not inevitable. We know what is causing climate change and we know how to prevent it.
While it is totally preventable, we as a species are choosing not to prevent it.
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marcus says
I can only hope.
marcus says
Yep, as humans have a sense of history and conservation, any machine life that we create will also probably have those values. In addition machine/AI and humans will not be competing for the same resources. It is the resource fight that causes the elimination of the "old" versions in the evolutionary tree.
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And I thought I was a techno geek..........
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leoj707 says
Correct. My question is "why"? Do we hate nuclear power *that* much? Nuclear power could at least slow the warming, giving us (and other life) more time to adapt, at least.
Instead we're just trying to get "the other guy" to stop driving his car.
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freak80 says
Ultimately we need to "adapt" by finding sustainable "safe" energy sources. We could be using all the cheap fossil fuels or nuclear to springboard development of sustainable energy, but we are not. What we get are complaints and political scandal when we fund development in alternative energy sources.
Yes, using nuclear has the possibility of slowing climate change, but only if we use it to reduce our, ever expanding, demand of fossil fuels. Even when supplementing with nuclear, fossil fuels are so cheap and easy I see us eventually burning them all.
In the end we still end up with the same issues: a terraformed planet and no sustainable energy alternative.
It is not so much that we hate nuclear, but nuclear is not a "solution", it is more of a band-aid on a bullet wound.
If we are bound and determined to burn every drop of fossil fuel that we can squeeze from the planet then there are no solutions. I have already posted this a couple of times, but here is an article that discusses why we will most likely use up as much fossil fuel as possible:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719
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leoj707 says
I beg to differ. I consider nuclear to be an excellent solution. It is a well proven technology with PLENTY of fuel, more if we are smart and use breeder reactors.
The problems to date with nuclear have been political, not technical nor IMHO economic. The high cost of reactors has been a result of a save a penny, lose a pound mentality. Costs cut in the design and building of reactors WILL come back to bite you as evidence by Fukushima.
Design it right, build it right, and run it right and a reactor will work great.
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leoj707 says
Or they come and steal our women!
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iwog says
Why are you wasting time chatting here on PatNet? For God's sake go start planting trees! Hurry!!
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Because that is how it appears.
Perhaps a bipartisan committee should be set up to determine where R&D funds for alternative energy sources should be spent. This removes the cloud of corruption, and with more hands in the decision making from both sides, something might actually be accomplished.
leoj707 says
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Then, acknowledging this reality, we should put all our efforts into atmosphere scrubbing technology. If you can't beat em, join em.
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New renter says
I am not sure if you are saying that reactors should cost more or less here.
New renter says
Anyway, the reason that we don't use breeder reactors is economic. While technically we know how to do it they cost more to build and maintain that a "normal" reactor.
On top of this --while I am not a subject matter expert here -- it is my understanding that breeder reactors are not as safe to run.
This extra cost just makes fossil fuels look more attractive.
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xrpb11a says
Ahhhh! ha! ha! ha!
Good one!
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New renter says
I've already made it crystal clear that I don't think any actions by humans will stop global warming.
That's not to say I haven't done a few things. I drive a natural gas truck, I have 7.5 kilowatts of solar panels on my roof. I recycle. I walk to the supermarket when the weather is nice.
None of it matters in the long run. Reducing my carbon footprint by 50% can only make fossil fuels cheaper for someone else, who will then burn it up anyway.
I'm very interested in this subject and I'll continue to watch the destruction of our planet unfold, but I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
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leoj707 says
I am, or at least my father was. One of his many nuclear projects was the Clinch River breeder reactor. According to him the amount of waste in the nuclear industry has been staggering. In his opinion the best approach would be to use a standardized reactor design and automate item as much as possible. Both three mile island and Chernobyl were the result of human operators overriding existing safety systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Chenobyl also had the distinction of using graphite rather than water as a neutron moderator. Water is better for safety reasons because if the reactor heats up the water boils away, the neutrons are not moderated and the reaction slows down.
Graphite on the other hand does not boil away, It burns. The burning of the graphite at Chernobyl made the problem much worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Fukashima was a poor implementation of the design - the cooling water should have had a gravity feed rather than being dependent on pumps.
http://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/magazine10/magazine/598-interview-cascading-infrastructure-failures.html
For anyone who has concerns regarding the artificial nature of nuclear power or has concerns regarding long term storage they would do well to read up on the Oklo reactors. In short two billion years ago we had natural nuclear fission reactors right here on Earth (and possibly Mars as well) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_reactor
The waste generated from the fission was very similar to that produced in modern man made reactors. Its daughter products are still there after two billion years! Mind you this was a 100% NATURAL reactor - no effort to contain the waste was made yet most of it stayed put.
http://www.new.ans.org/pi/np/oklo/
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iwog says
Maybe not, but they DO help property values.
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The all time ice melt record is now blown away (by a huge extent) however there isn't going to be an official report for another day or two. You can eyeball from this graph that the rate of ice disappearing has been accelerating so by extending the graph you can guesstimate an entirely ice free arctic summer in 10-15 years.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
The ice is a massive global heat sink and once it disappears from the north pole, the oceans will heat much faster. This will release the methane hydrates which will accelerate the process further.
100 years maybe, 200 tops. I'm convinced that is all there is left of human civilization.
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Southern isn't as bad. It appears to be increasing. Maybe we should move to Australia.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
Although:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/increasing-Antarctic-Southern-sea-ice.htm
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iwog says
Good riddance.
Then again, we're probably not that lucky.
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iwog says
When push comes to shove, humans work together to solve problems.
I don't know about civilization ending, but there will be a tipping point when we (as a species) either learn to work together more towards important global goals or not.
I do understand the human attributes and even what we see in current politics that would lead you to your conclusion.
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which makes every comment you have posted on global warming completely and utterly irrelevant.
iwog says
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marcus says
That will require a Global Government. Do we want that?
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how does magnetic polar shift factor into climate changing?
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-pole-shift.htm
In the past 15 million years scientists found pole shifts occurred four times every 1 million years. Though this averages out to once every 250,000 years, switches do not occur at regular intervals. During one period in the Cretaceous, polarity remained constant for as long as 30 million years, though this is believed to be an anomaly. The last pole shift took place 790,000 years ago; causing some scientists to believe we're due, while others speculate a reversal is already underway.
Dynamic processes taking place deep inside the planet generate Earth's magnetic field. A core of molten iron surrounds the inner core of solid iron, each rotating at different rates. Their interaction, and perhaps other geophysical processes not yet understood, creates what scientists call a "hydromagnetic dynamo." This self-perpetuating electric field acts in some ways like a gigantic bar magnet. The Earth's magnetic field extends into space for tens of thousands of miles from the planet's poles. It not only protects the Earth from solar radiation but plays a fundamental role in overall climate, weather patterns, and migratory habits of animals.
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New renter says
Yet nuclear has never existed anywhere on the planet without large amounts of government dollars involved. I'm not anti nuclear, but the economics have never worked anywhere without large subsidies of various kinds. That doesn't look likely to change in the future,
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marcus says
That's true but the south pole effect is misunderstood.
Warming makes southern glaciers move faster, which increases the rate in which those glaciers dump ice into the oceans and expand the ice cap. Therefore you get very little change in the total amount of sea ice each year, but massive reductions in the amount of ice over land.
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That's the thing...I thought most of the southern hemisphere ice was over land (Antarctica) and not sea ice. What matters more down there is the gain/loss of ice over land.
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Now for something really scary.
Below is a comparison of the current record reached in August 19th 2012 (a day early) and the previous record in September 2007. The first thing you notice of course is that we still have a LONG way to go before we reach the end of summer. A lot more ice is going to disappear between now and September.
The second thing you notice is how thick the ice was in 2007 versus how thin the ice is in 2012. The color indicates how dense the icepack is. The 2007 anomaly was caused mostly by strong winds and currents pushing the ice together into one dense blob. I remember back in 2007 listening to Rush Limbaugh ridicule climatologists because the record melt had nothing to do with global warming and was only an effect of winds and currents.
The remaining ice cap in 2007 was thick and dense. The remaining ice cap in 2012 is thin and broken. The oceans have become so warm that multi-year ice is pretty much impossible now.
Denying global warming in the face of this fantastic event is so bloody ignorant I can't believe humans are capable of it.
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bob2356 says
The reasons for the high cost of nuclear have been mostly political, not technical. Use a proven existing design, automate it as much as possible (almost all accidents are caused by human error) and mass produce them to bring down the cost.
Take a look at Toshiba's 4S reactor:
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2010/01/27/under-the-hood-with-duncan-williams-toshiba-4s-01272.aspx
30 years of power 24/7 Hidden underground the NIMBY's would quickly forget about it especially if they were compensated with low cost reliable power. Its amazing how quickly even the most virulent NIMBY shuts up when offered an appropriate bribe.
No refueling, low maintenance. When its done dig it up and haul it away for reprocessing.
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Iwog, would you please add the links to these pictures? As they are they are too small and the scale seams unreadable.
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New renter says
I'd go for living near a nuke plant when bribed with low-cost power. No problem.
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iwog says
There remains legitimate skepticism about the computer models that try to simulate the climate. That's the main "sticking point" with folks like Richard Lindzen and other related skeptics. They don't deny that there is indeed warming. The question is *how much* is natural (if any) and how much is from the CO2 buildup.
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iwog says
Iwog, your comment is misleading. The colors indicate sea ice concentration rather that its thickness. Sea ice concentration is defined as the area of sea ice relative to the total at a given point in the ocean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_ice_concentration
When sea currents move ice it cracks, crushes, some pieces overturn. Thus it reduces the sea ice concentration without reducing the total amount of ice.
What's interesting in your scheme is that in the area really close to the pole the concentration is still 80%-100%. That's only possible if new ice is still formed there even in the summer time.
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Fail.
The 2007 anomaly was caused by an abnormally high aurora borealis. Those magnetic particles in the atmosphere distort the coloring on your chart, rendering it useless.
As usual, your screaming "FIRE!" when someone only farted...
In late 2007, a new sunspot appeared on the sun, signaling the end of our quiet period. This sunspot had a reversed polarity magnetic field. According to NASA's solar physicist David Hathaway: "New solar cycles always begin with a high-latitude, reversed polarity sunspot," explains Hathaway. "'Reversed polarity' " means a sunspot with opposite magnetic polarity compared to sunspots from the previous solar cycle. 'High-latitude' refers to the sun's grid of latitude and longitude. Old cycle spots congregate near the sun's equator. New cycle spots appear higher, around 25 or 30 degrees latitude."
iwog says
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michaelsch says
I meant thickness as in sea ice concentration, not how thick the icepack is at any point. There is very little continuous ice pack left (the darkest purple areas) and most of what is left is broken. So little left in fact that talking about multi-year ice or thick ice as in how many meters the ice goes below the water is really an obsolete discussion. I didn't intend to be misleading.
freak80 says
This discussion is a reasonable one, however it cannot happen when Republicans ridicule any notion that the earth is warming up. Some do and some don't, but the mainstream professional idiots like Rush Limbaugh still deny any warming effect at all.
Personally I don't think it's a credible argument that CO2 concentrations and very fast global warming are just a coincidence happening at the same time. I also don't buy the explanation that CO2 is rising as a result of warming and not a cause of it.
It's extremely obvious that we're liberating CO2 into the air with every barrel of oil pumped and every truck full of coal mined. The hockey stick is real and humans are really having a huge effect on CO2 emissions. The theory is sound, the data conforms, and there really isn't anything left for anthropomorphic warming skeptics to challenge.
The natural warming argument lacks a theory, (solar radiation is actually dropping slightly, not increasing) a successful prediction, (2010 was supposed to be the beginning of the cooling trend, sunspots remember?) and legitimacy in the form of peer reviewed articles.