OT: Greenland is literally cracking apart and flooding the world

Fox News:

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 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill
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What seems to be happening in Greenland is that it's cold and snowy in the winter, so snow piles up on the ground. Then in summertime, it gets warm and the snow melts, and the water runs down into the ocean.

That's terrifying.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I actually had to laugh out loud. What an f-ing moron!

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

It's a little more complicated than that. The snow has been piling up for a few years now - the Greenland ice core project pulled out information about the climate over the last 100,000 years.

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Antarctic ice is a bit thicker, and the deepest stuff quite bit older.

The problem is that the ice sheet can slide off in large, thick chunks, and it can do it quite rapidly.

The bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with "accidentals" - boulders that ended up there when a chunk of ice sheet that had slid off into the North Atlantic finally melted and dropped its load of boulders.

The Greenland ice sheet isn't floating at the moment, but when it slides off it will start floating and displace ocean water.

There's about six metres of global sea level rise, just sitting there, waiting to slide off.

When similar ice sheets have slid of in the past, sea levels have risen quite rapidly. And it might dump enough fresh water in the North Atlantic to turn off the Gulf Stream for a few years.

The last time that happened, at the end of the most recent ice age

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the Gulf Stream stopped quickly - in less than decade - and stayed stopped for 1300+/-10 years.

The lakes the Fox News is reporting to be draining are feeding water down under the ice sheet - enough of it and the ice sheet will sitting on a nice thick layer of lubricating water, and will slide off into the ocean.

That's a problem that Fox News failed to mention.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

It's cold enough year-round for snow to stay on the ground, most places. There's plenty of room for it to pile up, which is what snow tends to do.

So you can either be in static equilibrium where what you gain replaces what you lose, you can be net gaining, or you can be net losing.

Over the past 20 years it's been net losing. By a lot!

The nice thing about snow that stays around for hundreds or thousands of years is that they keeps their own records so you can look and compare to other ice sheets of similar size that existed in history and say "Okay, so if this loss even just stays static what will the result be" and it's most reminiscient of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet in western Canada that was experiencing similar loss rates around 18,000 years ago, it raised sea levels 20 feet in around 500 years and swamped the land bridge to Asia.

5 feet of rise is enough to drown out every large coastal city in the world. So extrapolate that linearly (which is super-optimistic), do the math on that one and see how long they got best-case if that keeps up.
Reply to
bitrex

Don't forget to leave the grandkids some kayaks or canoes in the will. Gee thanks, Dad.

Reply to
bitrex

Eppur si bang-bang

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Reply to
Wanderer

If Trump wanted to do something I would approve of he could put Pilgrim generating station under Federal control as a resource vital to national security and fire all the dummies running the place, maybe "Neon John" would like to run it as a hobby project, yeah he's a jerk but probably doesn't drink on the job.

Reply to
bitrex

Isaac Asimov was a novelist (and probably a Communist O M G) who freely admitted he didn't really know much about actual science in practice, he had a degree in biochemistry and worked in academia for like, 5 minutes in the mid 1950s.

Reply to
bitrex

It's kind of similar to James Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis" which is interesting to think about but most scientists are pretty skeptical of.

"Daisyworld" works pretty good in a computer simulation but the real world isn't made up of daisies of varying reflectiveness it's not even spherical-cow-in-vacuum close to a realistic model.

Reply to
bitrex

There used to be much less ice than today about 1000 years ago:

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

What's unusual about Greenland is the significant geothermal heat flux. That melts channels below glaciers and punches holes in meltwater lakes from below, which can make them drain rapidly.

Nothing new there, but the hot spots do move around.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Isaac Asimov was a science writer. He read the science journals written in the high bullshit and translated them for mass consumption. The point is th at the theory was out there 40 years ago and had trickled down to the TV gu ide.

The graph is an IQ test which you failed. Continue the graph and show what happens next.

You are an example of what is wrong with our education system. You can not think for yourself. You find who society has christened as smart, memorize what they have to say and go around regurgitating it. "You're not qualified to think for me". You're just like those priests who went after Galileo. I gnore the data and just say "You're not qualified to question, the Bible, A ristotle and Ptolemy. I'm educated. I can quote the Bible, Aristotle and Pt olemy."

Reply to
Wanderer

Wow, TV Guide has all the answers now?

Ooof

Damn son, look at this wild Aspergers-inspired rant right here, going on about the Bible and Aristotle and shit. You ever touched a girl before?

Reply to
bitrex

He had a doctorate in biochemistry. He was no climate scientist, but he most certainly was a qualified scientist and an assistant professor at a university. He was a prolific writer, and heavily involved in popular science writing and promotion as well as writing science fiction (and many other topics, fiction and non-fiction). Politically, he was a democrat - thus somewhat left-wing in American eyes, but seriously right-wing to European eyes, and certainly not communist.

The graphs and explanations in the picture were current science at the time (1975) and show the basic pattern of ice ages in recent geological timeframes - a pattern that we have been disturbing at an accelerating pace since the invention of farming some 10,000 years ago.

Reply to
David Brown

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There a thermal gradient from the centre of the earth out to the whole of t he earth's surface - Greenland isn't all that special, though it does seem still have a bit of the extra heat from the magna plume now creating volcan oes in Iceland.

There are lakes under the Antarctic ice sheet that are heated by the same k ind of geothermal flux (mostly driven by radioactivity in the rocks of the core - there aren't lot of unstable isotopes in the core, but there is a lo t of core, and the heat eventually has to get to the surface).

The last time the earth warmed up a bit - at the end of the last ice age - lots of ice sheets slid off into the sea, and the sea level went up in fits and starts.

The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets seem to be on the verge of doin g something similar, in the next century or so.

It's a bit difficult to see what's going on at the bottom of an ice sheet, so saying exactly when is difficult, but they have been known to move fairl y quickly when they start moving. The friction between the moving ice sheet and whatever it's moving over is going to generate extra heat, and melt ev en more ice just where the melt-water produced is best placed to lubricate the movement.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

They've made some progress on that, and it has something to do with nuclear f^Hradiation.

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Cheers, James

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Less ice around the Atlantic. Denialist web-sites (and John Larkin, who is pretty much one of them) claim that the Medieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age were global, when the average temperature of the globe (as recorde d in isotope ratios in ice cores) actually stayed pretty stable.

Ocean currents do seem to have been moving around - like the El Nino/La Nin a alternation but over at least multidecadal time scales.

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

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was only identified in 1994. Something even slower would be even harder to nail down.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Climate science, like evolutionary biology and the academic study of whether Western civilization and white men were chosen by God to be the best kind of human or if it just happened naturally over time, is one of those odd discipline in that it seems anyone under the sun with a degree feels qualified to comment on authoritatively (and many who don't.)

The silly part is the rest of the image where the words of a novelist/popular science author are extrapolated into yet another silly electrical engineering-analogy of a "bang-bang" controller.

"What Isaac Asmiov was describing.." it says in the second picture ah no probably not that's probably not at all what he was describing. The climate as a whole is likely not a "bang-bang" controller, a 2nd-order PID loop, an LM324 op-amp integrator, or any such thing. Trying to extrapolate future behavior from these hammer-nail analogies is truly silly, like one must really enjoy the party game of "telephone."

Reply to
bitrex

"Look, I'm no expert in bridges or anything. But let me tell you all about the reasons I think this bridge right here collapsed..."

Reply to
bitrex

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