Topic: Big area of Antarctica melted in 2005

Mega X.exe
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Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in the summer of 2005
Satellite data shows an area the size of California melted
NASA: This is the most significant thawing in 30 years
Evidence of melting in several areas, including high elevations and far inland

WASHINGTON(Reuters) -- Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.

A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze -- the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, where ice sheets have been breaking apart.

Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado in Boulder measured snowfall accumulation and melt in Antarctica from July 1999 through July 2005.

They found evidence of melting in several areas, including high elevations and far inland in January of 2005, when temperatures got as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

"Increases in snowmelt, such as this in 2005, definitely could have an impact on larger scale melting of Antarctica's ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time," Steffen said in a statement.

"Water from melted snow can penetrate into ice sheets through cracks and narrow, tubular glacial shafts called moulins," Steffen added.

"If sufficient melt water is available, it may reach the bottom of the ice sheet. This water can lubricate the underside of the ice sheet at the bedrock, causing the ice mass to move toward the ocean faster, increasing sea level."

NASA's QuikScat satellite detected extensive areas of snowmelt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005.

MagimanV1.5
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So, why aren't we preparing for the heating/ice age cycle as is definetly expected (and, indeed, historically predicted) to occur? We beat the cavemen out in technology, so we should be able to adapt to this change instead of having Al Gore get press coverage by claiming humans are causing this global warming (which, by the way, is occuring on Venus, Pluto, and one other planet).
But that's just me.

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RisingDragon
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Y'know, if you've watched that movie of Al Gore's, An Inconvienent Truth, you'd have already known this by now. >.> I might not like the guy, but he does have a point.

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Black Dranzer.exe
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Quote:
Originally posted by RisingDragon
Y'know, if you've watched that movie of Al Gore's, An Inconvienent Truth, you'd have already known this by now. >.> I might not like the guy, but he does have a point.

I just have issues with politicians who look like they got their hair cut at a Best Cuts in the Food court of a mall...

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HighMaxOmega
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Quote:
Originally posted by RisingDragon
Y'know, if you've watched that movie of Al Gore's, An Inconvienent Truth, you'd have already known this by now. >.> I might not like the guy, but he does have a point.

Actually, all of the points were proven wrong in the book A Skeptic's Guide to An Inconvenient Truth, which breaks down the book/documentary and provides concrete evidence to beat out Gore's apocalyptic doomsday speeches. I saw the movie in Biology - the teacher said it had no politics - I saw several direct shots at the government and Bush, and we skipped a section that the teacher said "dealt with politics." Tells me a lot about why he's out speaking.

Didn't like him in 2000, sure as heck like him no better now.

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Mega X.exe
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Quote:
Originally posted by MagimanV1.5
So, why aren't we preparing for the heating/ice age cycle as is definetly expected (and, indeed, historically predicted) to occur? We beat the cavemen out in technology, so we should be able to adapt to this change instead of having Al Gore get press coverage by claiming humans are causing this global warming (which, by the way, is occuring on Venus, Pluto, and one other planet).
But that's just me.

We don't cause it, but we contribute.

HighMaxOmega
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Quote:
Originally posted by Mega X.exe

Quote:
Originally posted by MagimanV1.5
So, why aren't we preparing for the heating/ice age cycle as is definetly expected (and, indeed, historically predicted) to occur? We beat the cavemen out in technology, so we should be able to adapt to this change instead of having Al Gore get press coverage by claiming humans are causing this global warming (which, by the way, is occuring on Venus, Pluto, and one other planet).
But that's just me.

We don't cause it, but we contribute.

Though we may contribute, the amount we contribute versus the amount that is naturally occurring is so small that if it were to completely vanish Al Gore would still be whining.

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HollowTorment
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Yes but, if this makes us less dependent on fossil fuels then I couldn't care less who's saying it or doing it.

HighMaxOmega
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Quote:
Originally posted by HollowTorment
Yes but, if this makes us less dependent on fossil fuels then I couldn't care less who's saying it or doing it.

I am thrilled by the idea of searching for new fuel sources, but I have to say that the whole "global warming will destriy the world OMG OMG OMG" thing has to stop - the Kyoto Protocol is costing the US about $340,000,000,000 to save an undetectable .003506441� C by the year 2050, a ton of the stuff Gore tells you ain't true, agreed on by many scientists, and there are loons preaching that an ICE AGE is coming.

Good goly, where's the sense in all this? Al Gore urges all the useless spending to save the trees that don't even need to be saved, then spins around and yells at the government for spending to much - that shows us pretty plainly his intentions. Idiot.

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HollowTorment
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..it's not the first time the US has wasted millions/billions on pointless crap. So yeah.

Mega X.exe
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Quote:
Originally posted by HighMaxOmega
Though we may contribute, the amount we contribute versus the amount that is naturally occurring is so small that if it were to completely vanish Al Gore would still be whining.

An overwhelming majority of the scientific community believes that humans are responsible, though it is far from unanimous.

Smirnoff
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I just don't want to be dependant on the arabs for oil. Just about all of them 'cept for Israel hates us.

HighMaxOmega
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Strike one

Strike two

Strike three

Gore's out.

Edited by HighMaxOmega on May 21, 2007 at 14:42:28.

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HollowTorment
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Quote:
Originally posted by Smirnoff
I just don't want to be dependant on the arabs for oil. Just about all of them 'cept for Israel hates us.

Exactly my point about being less dependent on fossil fuels, yes.

Black Dranzer.exe
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Quote:
Originally posted by Smirnoff
I just don't want to be dependant on the arabs for oil. Just about all of them 'cept for Israel hates us.

I think we should fight OPEC personally. If they want to scalp us for oil prices, then let's refuse them some western goods, for example:

"Haha, i'm going to make it $4 U.S. a gallon"

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Mega X.exe
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Quote:
Originally posted by HighMaxOmega
Strike one

Strike two

Strike three

Gore's out.

Edited by HighMaxOmega on May 21, 2007 at 14:42:28.

You wanna bring the Competitive Enterprise Institute into this?

Quote:
CEI has been called an "ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business" by Sourcewatch, which has in turn been criticised (by Alan Caruba) as being funded by "left-wing foundations... that seek a competitive edge or want to influence public policy". Sourcewatch refers to CEI as being "a neoliberal think tank" and has posted articles such as "Smoking as a civic duty", criticizing a series of CEI articles containing that quote.

In May 2006, CEI released a controversial ad campaign with two television commercials arguing that global warming is not a problem. The commercials used the tagline "Carbon Dioxide - They call it pollution; We call it life." One ad stated that the world's glaciers are "growing, not melting... getting thicker, not thinner."The ad cited two Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor for Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said CEI was misrepresenting his previous research to back their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," he said.

The second ad in the campaign claimed that carbon dioxide is misrepresented as a pollutant, stating that "it�s essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in... They call it pollution. We call it life." However, the academic consensus among scientific organizations worldwide is that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are causing Earth's surface temperatures to warm. For example, in June 2005, the science academies of eleven leading industrialized nations (including the United States' National Academy of Sciences) released "Joint science academies' statement: Global response to climate change" which stated that carbon dioxide levels have increased from 280 ppm to 375 ppm in the last 256 years, and that "Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise..."

Individuals associated with CEI have also been criticised. Steven Milloy has written extensively on global warming and other topics while receiving undisclosed funding from ExxonMobil. Following this disclosure, Milloy's name was removed from the list of adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute. He was subsequently appointed as an adjunct scholar at CEI.

I can provide sources, if you like.

Edited by Mega X.exe on May 22, 2007 at 2:26:10.

MagimanV1.5
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Quote:
Originally posted by Smirnoff
I just don't want to be dependant on the arabs for oil. Just about all of them 'cept for Israel hates us.

Well, and Saudi Arabia saved us from a huge terrorist attack a few weeks back. Can't say that's hate.

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Tri-Edge
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Well, its not just the fuels we need to worry about. It's also the land fills and our other means of dealing with wastes. It's kinda out of our hands....where could we put all of the trash we've made? We could launch it into space, not to look like an idiot but....maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea x.x. We can't recycle everything so we've got to do the best we can by being conservative I suppose. No one is going to completely give up Fossil fuels because once the price of fuel goes down below what the alternate safe fuels cost....people will go right back to fossil fuels again. Conserving is the least we can do.

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Quote:
Originally posted by Tri-Edge
...where could we put all of the trash we've made? We could launch it into space, not to look like an idiot but....maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea x.x

Definitely NOT a good idea. Anything put in orbit presents a danger in short or long term, so we'd need to send the trash away from the Earth. However, sending something away from the planet takes a lot more energy than it does to put something in orbit, to the point where it wouldn't be cost-effective. We'll continue to bury trash for a long time before the space option becomes even a possibility.

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Tri-Edge
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So basically you're saying, if we were to put trash out there into space we'd be saying hello to a big trash meteor XD? YAY TRASH METEOR! oh....I mean oh crap....

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Both sides of the argument can cite reliable sources, otherwise there wouldn't be a well-known argument within the intelligent scientific community. (God is an exception to this rule, since the religious side didn't try to claim sources, originally.) The people who say there IS no global warming at all, now that's a problem. (i.e. those who are not arguing human vs. natural but rather "the earth isn't hotter then it used to be").

Cavemen supposedly had no technology (we don't know this for sure; Egypt, Romans, Greek?), but they had resiliance. Modern humans can't survive in like -23, and though we handle heat better then we handle cold as far as survival goes, technology made us weaker as organisms, so there's a trade-off involved rather then sole improvement.

Trash should be burnt, but only after being kept for say 89 years, so that whoever threw it out is dead and we know for sure they won't desperately need to find something that shouldn't have been there (you may think 80 years is a long time but currently what we have is a lot older then that so if we once a month burn all the garbage-dump garbage that is 80 years old, we'll be okay with the garbage. Plus that gives anything organic time to decompose rather then being turned into useless ash).

And as for the melting itself... you just found this out now?

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Quote:
Originally posted by Tri-Edge
So basically you're saying, if we were to put trash out there into space we'd be saying hello to a big trash meteor XD? YAY TRASH METEOR! oh....I mean oh crap....

Not only that. Space trash is especially annoying as it moves around the Earth very fast. At those speeds, even something as small as a screw can break through a space shuttle window. This is definitely NOT a good thing for the rockets, shuttles, satellites, space stations and everything else being put in orbit.

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Tri-Edge
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x.x ooooh that would suck like hell. I keep forgetting that when something is given enough speed it can do way more damage than it used to. Wow...if were were to do that, we'd be turning the outside of our atmosphere into a giant globe shaped cheese grater for ships.

In memory of .hack//Chat I say one last time: "Let's meet again sometime, in that place we love to go. The Root town of Mac Anu!"
.... .hack//kyat....we miss you dearly