An Iraqi American who wants to see peace and justice in the world.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Sea levels will rise
A reminder of where humans are headed with climate change. I wonder what kinds of problems humans will deal with over the next century because of rising sea levels. I worry for our children and their children.
We're in an ice age. Have been for 750,000 years. We know we're still in an ice age, because the big chunk of ice called Antarctica hasn't melted yet. For 90% of the last 750,000 years, most of the planet looked like Antarctica. Huge glaciers, miles thick. Those started melting when we entered the current interglacial period 12,000 years ago. Sea levels rose 400 ft. Places like the Great Lakes and Baltic Sea were formed.
A 400 ft. rise in sea levels wasn't the end of the world. Quite the opposite, at least for humans. Global warming allowed for growing seasons. Agriculture was finally possible. That allowed people to gather in one place, instead of constantly searching for their next meal. Humans were nothing but cavemen until the Holocene got underway. Every human advance has come in those last 12,000 years.
Don't let these climatologists stress you out. When I was your age, they were warning everyone that the earth was about to become an ice cube. We were all doomed. It was time to bend over and kiss our asses good-bye. Now, they're saying just the opposite. This much they won't argue with though. If we can double CO2 levels to about 750 PPM, we can put off the next glacial period for as long as 50,000 years. That would save about 7 billion lives....or about 95% of the population, whichever comes first.
Step right up... You too can be a Global Warming sucker...
Meanwhile in the real science department: Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.
The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.
CO2 is our friend. Without it, we have no plants or trees. It makes up only .039% of our atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, CO2 is relatively weak. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, and methane levels have more than doubled in the same time CO2 levels climbed 25%.
You can do your part to save the planet by not farting. Cow farts have more of an adverse impact on the climate than man's CO2 emissions. Seriously.
A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.
I too reject cliched and alarmist global warming talk. They used to warn about COLD, and at other times they warn about HOTNESS, which shows a lack of seriousness on the part of these hippie types.
Also philosophically, they promote certain concepts which are unacceptable to me. For instance Daryl Hannah promotes the idea of SAVING. (Such as saving energy, or sacrificing and not spending stuff the way you would like to.)
See, to me that is not a SOLUTION. A solution would be to find a way to remove the end problem (and continue spending)!
"A 400 ft. rise in sea levels wasn't the end of the world."
It won't be the end of the world. It will just be the end of large parts of New York City, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, London, Bangladesh, and other areas that are currently at sea level. The loss of that land and might cause serious conflict.
' "Those models could be used to predict the melting of the ice. The suggested melting starts around 900 ppm (parts per million)," he said, a level he believes could be reached by the end of this century, unless serious emissions cuts were made. '
The building sector is responsible for 48% of emissions. A smart architect says: "...it's a crisis that could really destabilize our country...these are the projections. Do you want insurance or not? We have to decide, do we want to take that risk?..."
Muhannad, Humans in the end have little effect on large scale global fluctuations. We're like ants. The sun, on the other hand, is the greatest factor in any global warming or cooling as well as possibly being responsible for pole shifts if they exist.
The current interglacial is 11,400 years old. The Holocene climatic optimum occurred 5700 years ago. We're teetering on the precipice of another glacial period. If it happens, it's an extinction event for humans. Agriculture would be impossible with shortened growing seasons. Fish and wildlife would be quickly scavenged, and most of the human population would then starve to death. Don't take my word for it. Check out this chart. Present time is over on the right.
http://tinyurl.com/8ktr5f
The only hope in hell to save 95% of the population is to belch out enough greenhouse gasses to forestall the next glacial age. That seems to be exactly what's happening. Check out the blue and green lines. Those squiggly moves haven't happened before.
The red line in that chart represents ice volumes over the last 450,000 years. Notice that we're at the same point where three previous interglacials came to an end. Those were followed by glacial periods, when huge ice sheets covered much of the world. We really don't need that.
We may be delaying an ice age, but if we allow CO2 to rise to 900 ppm, all arctic ice will melt and that will cause sea levels to rise and flood many areas where large numbers of humans currently live. It would be chaos. Humans are already fighting over food and resources. I can't imagine what would happen if billions of people are dislocated and the food supply is disrupted.
"By looking even farther back in time, Miller and colleagues' newest study reveals that the 20th century's abrupt warming may have in fact interrupted millennia of steady cooling.
It's "pretty clear that the most reasonable explanation for that reversal is due to increasing greenhouse gases," Miller said.
The researchers' computer climate models dovetails with field data such as sediment cores and tree rings, which "really … solidifies our understanding," he said.
Eventually Earth will slip again into the pattern of cyclical ice ages, Miller added, but it may be thousands of years before that happens.'
"Miller and colleagues found that the wobble in Earth's tilt causes Arctic temperatures to drop by about 0.36 degree Fahrenheit (0.2 degree Celsius) every thousand years during a cooling phase.
But human-caused global warming overwhelmed that gradual cooling in the mid-1990s, shooting temperatures up by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) over the course of a few decades.
In fact four of the five warmest decades in the past 2,000 years occurred after 1950, according to the study, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Science."
'Summer Arctic sea ice, which hit a record low in 2007, will probably have dissolved completely by 2030.
Without swaths of white ice to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, those rays will instead be absorbed into the darker oceans—speeding up the region's warming.
And melting permafrost is already starting to release carbon dioxide and methane, two potent greenhouse gases that have long been trapped underground.
"It's pretty straightforward that amplification will continue in the future. There will be direct impacts in the Arctic," study co-author Miller said.
"The big issue is, when you melt ice, the sea level rises—that's a global issue, and that has major impacts." '
I'll take the global warming over a glacial period any day. If you looked at that chart of the last 450,000 years, you noticed how temps rise and peak, and then fall abruptly. That didn't happen this time around. Just when it seemed to have peaked, temperatures rose yet again. We should be breathing collective sighs of relief. A billion people moving further inland is preferable to 5 billion being buried by glaciers.
17 comments :
We're in an ice age. Have been for 750,000 years. We know we're still in an ice age, because the big chunk of ice called Antarctica hasn't melted yet. For 90% of the last 750,000 years, most of the planet looked like Antarctica. Huge glaciers, miles thick. Those started melting when we entered the current interglacial period 12,000 years ago. Sea levels rose 400 ft. Places like the Great Lakes and Baltic Sea were formed.
A 400 ft. rise in sea levels wasn't the end of the world. Quite the opposite, at least for humans. Global warming allowed for growing seasons. Agriculture was finally possible. That allowed people to gather in one place, instead of constantly searching for their next meal. Humans were nothing but cavemen until the Holocene got underway. Every human advance has come in those last 12,000 years.
Don't let these climatologists stress you out. When I was your age, they were warning everyone that the earth was about to become an ice cube. We were all doomed. It was time to bend over and kiss our asses good-bye. Now, they're saying just the opposite. This much they won't argue with though. If we can double CO2 levels to about 750 PPM, we can put off the next glacial period for as long as 50,000 years. That would save about 7 billion lives....or about 95% of the population, whichever comes first.
Step right up... You too can be a Global Warming sucker...
Meanwhile in the real science department:
Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.
The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/256079/only-9099-last-10500-years-warmer-2010-brian-bolduc
CO2 is our friend. Without it, we have no plants or trees. It makes up only .039% of our atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, CO2 is relatively weak. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, and methane levels have more than doubled in the same time CO2 levels climbed 25%.
You can do your part to save the planet by not farting. Cow farts have more of an adverse impact on the climate than man's CO2 emissions. Seriously.
A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.
http://tinyurl.com/yrlcp5
I too reject cliched and alarmist global warming talk. They used to warn about COLD, and at other times they warn about HOTNESS, which shows a lack of seriousness on the part of these hippie types.
Also philosophically, they promote certain concepts which are unacceptable to me. For instance Daryl Hannah promotes the idea of SAVING. (Such as saving energy, or sacrificing and not spending stuff the way you would like to.)
See, to me that is not a SOLUTION.
A solution would be to find a way to remove the end problem (and continue spending)!
"A 400 ft. rise in sea levels wasn't the end of the world."
It won't be the end of the world. It will just be the end of large parts of New York City, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, London, Bangladesh, and other areas that are currently at sea level. The loss of that land and might cause serious conflict.
' "Those models could be used to predict the melting of the ice. The suggested melting starts around 900 ppm (parts per million)," he said, a level he believes could be reached by the end of this century, unless serious emissions cuts were made. '
The building sector is responsible for 48% of emissions. A smart architect says: "...it's a crisis that could really destabilize our country...these are the projections. Do you want insurance or not? We have to decide, do we want to take that risk?..."
Muhannad,
Humans in the end have little effect on large scale global fluctuations. We're like ants. The sun, on the other hand, is the greatest factor in any global warming or cooling as well as possibly being responsible for pole shifts if they exist.
The current interglacial is 11,400 years old. The Holocene climatic optimum occurred 5700 years ago. We're teetering on the precipice of another glacial period. If it happens, it's an extinction event for humans. Agriculture would be impossible with shortened growing seasons. Fish and wildlife would be quickly scavenged, and most of the human population would then starve to death. Don't take my word for it. Check out this chart. Present time is over on the right.
http://tinyurl.com/8ktr5f
The only hope in hell to save 95% of the population is to belch out enough greenhouse gasses to forestall the next glacial age. That seems to be exactly what's happening. Check out the blue and green lines. Those squiggly moves haven't happened before.
The red line in that chart represents ice volumes over the last 450,000 years. Notice that we're at the same point where three previous interglacials came to an end. Those were followed by glacial periods, when huge ice sheets covered much of the world. We really don't need that.
We may be delaying an ice age, but if we allow CO2 to rise to 900 ppm, all arctic ice will melt and that will cause sea levels to rise and flood many areas where large numbers of humans currently live. It would be chaos. Humans are already fighting over food and resources. I can't imagine what would happen if billions of people are dislocated and the food supply is disrupted.
"By looking even farther back in time, Miller and colleagues' newest study reveals that the 20th century's abrupt warming may have in fact interrupted millennia of steady cooling.
It's "pretty clear that the most reasonable explanation for that reversal is due to increasing greenhouse gases," Miller said.
The researchers' computer climate models dovetails with field data such as sediment cores and tree rings, which "really … solidifies our understanding," he said.
Eventually Earth will slip again into the pattern of cyclical ice ages, Miller added, but it may be thousands of years before that happens.'
"Miller and colleagues found that the wobble in Earth's tilt causes Arctic temperatures to drop by about 0.36 degree Fahrenheit (0.2 degree Celsius) every thousand years during a cooling phase.
But human-caused global warming overwhelmed that gradual cooling in the mid-1990s, shooting temperatures up by about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 degrees Celsius) over the course of a few decades.
In fact four of the five warmest decades in the past 2,000 years occurred after 1950, according to the study, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Science."
'Summer Arctic sea ice, which hit a record low in 2007, will probably have dissolved completely by 2030.
Without swaths of white ice to reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, those rays will instead be absorbed into the darker oceans—speeding up the region's warming.
And melting permafrost is already starting to release carbon dioxide and methane, two potent greenhouse gases that have long been trapped underground.
"It's pretty straightforward that amplification will continue in the future. There will be direct impacts in the Arctic," study co-author Miller said.
"The big issue is, when you melt ice, the sea level rises—that's a global issue, and that has major impacts." '
I'll take the global warming over a glacial period any day. If you looked at that chart of the last 450,000 years, you noticed how temps rise and peak, and then fall abruptly. That didn't happen this time around. Just when it seemed to have peaked, temperatures rose yet again. We should be breathing collective sighs of relief. A billion people moving further inland is preferable to 5 billion being buried by glaciers.
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