Entire Antarctic Shelf splitting away from Continent.

[RiversideGator]

Jabberwocky.

So, you actually thought that your pictures proved something then?   

[RiversideGator]

BTW, get ready for some global cooling.  There is an arctic blast on the way:

Coldest in Years Plains to East Coast
Updated: Friday, January 09, 2009 2:49 PM

This is about as bad as it gets folks. I don't think I've seen anything like it since 1994. Sure its been very cold at times over the past 14 years, but the total area impacted by this cold wave will be huge. By next Thursday and Friday, extremely cold air will chill the entire area from the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard, and the cold is also going to reach the Deep South. Only the far West will be unscathed.

From the central Plains to the Northeast temperatures are going below zero; there is no question about it. Meanwhile, the Upper Midwest and northern New England could experience readings lower than 30 below zero!

One might have to go back to Jan. 1994 to find anything worse. In that bitter outbreak, temperatures went below zero from the central Plains to the East Coast. In New York there is a chance it will go below zero next Thursday or Friday night. The last time New York City experienced a below-zero temperature was Jan. 1994.

Did I mention there could be a snowstorm to boot? Yes, that very well could happen. Low pressure riding the leading edge of the bitter blast could put down a significant amount of snow starting in the Midwest Tuesday then reaching the East on Wednesday.

Story by AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist John Kocet.

http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?article=5

[RiversideGator]

Meanwhile, 2008 was an average temperature year when compared with temperatures since 1895 but December was colder than average:

US Temperature in 2008 Was Near 20th Century Average (Update1)

By Jim Efstathiou Jr.

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The temperature for the U.S. in 2008 was near the annual average experienced since 1895 and below normal for December, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

The average temperature in the contiguous states was 53 degrees Fahrenheit (11.7 degrees Celsius), 0.2 degrees above the 20th-century average, according to a report today from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

U.S. temperatures have increased 0.12 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1895 and by 0.41 degrees in the last 50 years, NOAA data show.

Across the U.S., December bought an average temperature of 32.5 degrees, 0.9 degrees below the long-term norm. As a region, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin had its 10th-coldest December on record.

Parts of the Southwest U.S. bucked the trend. South Carolina saw its sixth-warmest December on record while in Georgia last month was the eighth-warmest, NOAA data show.

December snowstorms produced more than 2,000 daily snowfall records in the U.S. Satellite data show that 6.8 million square miles (17.6 million square kilometers) of North America were covered by snow in December, 0.4 million square miles above the 1966 to 2008 average.

Average precipitation last year was 30.48 inches, 1.34 inches above the long-term norm.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=atCU2FgMa07I&refer=home

[BridgeTroll]

I have to say Stephen... In this case your pictures do not help your case at all.  It clearly shows that coastlines have drastically changed over time and that man had very little to do with it.

[gatorback]

I agree with you Stephen that if you if don't plan expect the worst.  Just back from Seabrook.  Seabrook is a small city on Galveston Bay.  If you were near the bay, you were 6 feet underwater whenever Ike came through.  The business that didn't plan are having a hard time getting back in action; however, the businesses with a plan are back in action already.  Still today, boats tossed all over the place.  Fences down, roofs gone, etc. You can tell the   business that planned.  They are up and running.  The ones without a plan is like duh, what were you thinking.

[gatorback]

That's fine.

Keep in mind that the scientists staked the claim about lower ice volume, but they didn't offer numbers. So provide all the technical data you want, I still remain unconvinced.

Great.  Google it.  I will say it has to do with light and the properties of light.  I'll leave that as an exercise for you. 

[civil42806]

I have to say Stephen... In this case your pictures do not help your case at all.  It clearly shows that coastlines have drastically changed over time and that man had very little to do with it.

That is my point.

Always has been.  Regardless of whatever causes there are at work, its tremendously stupid (in fact jawdroppingly boneheaded) for a coastal city not to have a contingency plan for rising waters.

Ive never been concerned with the causes, to be honest.  If they are manmade (which I now believe them to be) then we should stop doing whatever it is we can.  But in any case, we should have a plan for how to deal with the waters.  We dont.  We dont even have the conversation in place to plan.  Thats always been my point, since this is primarily a planning site.

Unfortunately, the subject has been hijacked be the jawbone of an ass for two years, so that instead of doing something constructive in the way of readiness weve been forced to discuss the only subject that he wants to discuss:  His personal unbacked, unscientific minority opinion.

The submerged coastal cities are proof of what happens when cultures don't plan.

Ahhhh that explains it then Stepehn, thanks, just didn't understand why you had posted those pictures.

[tufsu1]

DUDE, thats march 19th 2008

sure...but if you look at the chart above that River posted, March 2008 was relatively high in termd of the coverage of sea ice.

[gatorback]

Thin ice unfortunetlty.

[BridgeTroll]

Those wacky Russians...

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/

Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

11.01.2009 Source: Pravda.Ru URL: http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-earth_ice_age-0

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

Elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the Czech mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the prestigious journal “Science” published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled “Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.

In their 1976 paper Imbrie, Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "… must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

During the 1970s the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory that ‘greenhouse gasses’ such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the theory of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) has gradually become accepted as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

In 1999 the British journal “Nature” published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores collected at the Russia ’s Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures, atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.

The reason that global CO2 levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment. We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent them from loosing their ‘fizz’, which is a feature of their carbonation, or CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earth’s temperature, we should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight hundred years after the end of the earth’s current Interglacial warm period. We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the world’s oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

About 325,000 years ago, at the peak of a warm interglacial, global temperature and CO2 levels were higher than they are today. Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

Gregory F. Fegel

[jandar]

And yet you fully trust the ice thickness data from 1979?

[BridgeTroll]

The submerged coastal cities are proof of what happens when cultures don't plan.

This may be so Stephen but from what I can gather most of the cities that have been discovered submerged are there due to earthquake, volcano's, or a cataclysmic flood caused by one or the other.  American cities most likely to share the same fate would be L.A., San Fran, Seattle area, and Anchorage.  I assume you are not suggesting moving those cities and their populations to somewhere more safe.  Most people, including myself, believe we should no doubt plan for disasters of all kind.  But if we cannot even agree that New Orleans should be permanently evacuated and moved to high ground then I think this sort of planning is not likely to occur...

[gatorback]

Sure I trust NASA scientists.  They know how to measure. Well, except for that one guy who caused that Mars spacecraft to crash.  Actually, that was because of mix up between imperial and metric measures I think.  So sure, why not trust they are thinning.

[Charleston native]

I see nobody can answer my question. Typical. But not unexpected.

As far as making a contingency plan, I actually agree with you Stephen; every low-lying coastal city should have some sort of contingency for floods and rising waters. We can disagree with the causes of flooding until we're blue in the face, but it is imperative for a disaster plan to be formulated. Many cities in the coastal Southeast should have a hurricane plan, and those plans have incorporated contingencies for rising waters. Maybe government leaders could formulate something from those plans to provide some sort of protection.

Keep in mind, however, this does not include "green" initiatives. The plan should address protection and preparation. The problem is that we're talking about our governments to do something. Their incompetence knows no bounds, and it is foolhardy to solely rely on them for solutions.

[gatorback]

The questions you have that have not already been answered in this thread are available on The Net.  You know that.  Don't be a Goober.  As far as "Their incompetence knows no bounds", remember, "Their" in this case, is the Bush administration--and you know, that's not just my thinking--he's leaving with like an 18% approval rate.  Personally, I'm looking forward to life after Jan. 20.  Because for the past 4 years...well, let's just fail forward.