Glaciers Melting

ve-los...

I find it very amusing how religious people like me could see through this "scientific" hoax for years, and how so many "objective" anti- religious people fell for this hoax hook-line-sinker. All the while patting themselves on the back and congratulating themselves for how much more intellectual they were than religious folk.

The global warming sham (the sham part is that somehow having huge tax increases {that will go for bigger gov.'t} will somehow solve the problem) is, fortunately, unraveling and splitting at the seams.

have-los...

Actually, what the GRACE satellites measure is not the ice in the glaciers, but the mass of the mountains involved, including the glaciers, and the lakes they feed.

The Himalayas aren't loosing any significant mass, which can be interpreted as evidence that the glaciers aren't melting, but may just mean that their 5mm rise per year is more or less compensating for any glacier melt-back.

"The Indo-Australian plate is still moving at 67 mm per year, and over the next 10 million years it will travel about 1,500 km into Asia. About 20 mm per year of the India-Asia convergence is absorbed by thrusting along the Himalaya southern front. This leads to the Himalayas rising by about 5 mm per year, making them geologically active. The movement of the Indian plate into the Asian plate also makes this region seismically active, leading to earthquakes from time to time."

There's no scientific hoax. There was a thoroughly stupid mistake in the last IPCC report, where an ill-founded popular science story about rapid glacier retreat in the Himalayas made it into the report, despite not having a shred of scientific backing. You've now over- interpreted another report by taking it as evidence that the Himalayan glacier aren't retreating at all, which isn't actually what was measured

There's no religious content to anthropogenic global warming. Some of the religious find it difficult to believe that God would organise the world in such a way that they can't drive gas guzzlers for ever, but that's a trifle eccentric.

If you are putting yourself forward as an example of the religious, you just demonstrated that you can't read a science article without missing half the message. Admittedly, "The Register" does give its articles a denialist slant

and hasn't emphasised that the GRACE satellites measure total mass rather than just ice.

One more silly conspiracy theory. The process of slowing down anthropogenic global warming is going to cost us all money - at least in the short term - because - at the moment - renewable energy is roughly twice as expensive as energy obtained by burning fossil carbon.

By the time we've pushed up production of renewable energy generators to a level where they can replace a lot of our fossil-carbon-burning generators, the consequent economies of scale will probably make renewable energy cheaper than fossil-carbon generated energy, but that's several decades in the future, and by that time we'll probably be having to work quite a bit harder to extract fossil carbon from the ground - we've already dug up most of the easily accessible stuff - which will make oil and coal a good deal more expensive than they are now.

Big government doesn't come into it, though it will probably take some government intervention to persuade people that burning fossil carbon is an anti-social activity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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=20 Wot! Are you an authority on religion now?=20

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snip a lot of fossil talk

From a few years ago, but still interesting. Demonstrates how little it had= to do with science and how much it had to do with big government, as Brent= says, and money.=20

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What you snipped was an explanation of why this probably isn't true - the GRACE satellites measure mass, not ice, and since the Himalayas are rising at 5mm per year, there will be more rock there every year, which is probably - partially - compensating for the ice loss from glaciers. The GRACE satellites don't report a zero mass loss, but merely rather less than direct observation of the glaciers had lead people to expect.

I've been exposed to rather more religion than I'd have liked - it doesn't make me an expert, but I do have more of an appreciation of the way the "religious" mind fails to work than I'd really like.

ad to do with science and how much it had to do with big government, as Bre= nt says, and money.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/200=

Right-wing nitwit pontification. You need to read "Merchants of Doubt"

about how right-wing scientists were happy to turn their back on scientific facts - originally, that smoking cigarettes harms your health - because taking the facts seriously meant that government regulation was going to impede the free market rights of the tobacco peddlers, and their successors..

If you are so committed to the free market that you find it more important that Exxon-Mobil be allowed to keep on selling fossil carbon for fuel than it is to keep anthropogenic global warming within bounds, this sort of argument may look plausible to you.

In fact it's just an exhibition of ideologically blinkered ignorance - of the kind James Arthur posts here at least once a week ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen