Metro Jacksonville

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/21/new-greenland-ice-cracks_n_120516.html

Well this sucks the big one.

Welcome to Florida, glorified sand bar.

We go first.

QuoteWASHINGTON â€" In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.

If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland.

The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.

"The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off.... It is imminent."

The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists.

"As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north _ and Petermann is as far north as you can get _ it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.

The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?
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"It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means."

It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.

University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal."

However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what's ahead.

Further south in Greenland, Box's satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland.

That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."

Quote from: stephendare on August 22, 2008, 10:53:01 AM

Quote"It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means."

It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.

University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal."

I do not feel the need to get into a debate about the virtues of global warming.  As I was reading the article you posted, I noticed that there is nothing absolute or even approaching absolute about the need to worry about this.  Just thinking maybe it isn't all imminent doom and gloom.  Jacksonville has had a tough enough week from mother nature, so no need to get so concerned over something that may mean nothing. 

Ha.  Fair enough.  Just not in a chicken little mood today, although potentially warranted.

I couldn't agree more.  I am a bit skeptical about some of the climate change rhetoric, as I think there are many people out there who would merely use it as a tool to create hysteria or knee-jerk legislation and achieve far less noble goals.  But there is enough evidence to convince me something is happening.  Is it "normal"?  Is it man made climate change?  Is it dire or nothing to worry about?  After decent amounts of research, I still don't know.. but I think it would be foolish to not start planning and being more thoughtful and intelligent stewards of the planet in case it all really is true.  I think I hear someone calling for me to turn in my Republican party membership card... drat.

QuoteI just think that we need to do some comprehensive planning to minimize the effects of the water rise.

I'm freaking in a panic, GREENLAND is being covered by the sea, and what's next?

Durbin?
Bayard?
Sunbeam?

We're doomed for sure.  

OCKLAWAHA

 :D :D

Good one Stephen.

Perhaps we should recycle the skyway structures?

Edgar Cayce said this was going to happen!  

Ocklawaha

Stephen:

I would hardly blame our current flooding on what is going on in Greenland.  Our flooding as you know was a result of very heavy rain and storm surge from a tropical storm that didn't want to move from North and Central Florida. I understand the point of your article and you are right on regarding the need to plan for rising sea levels.

I fervently believe in the science behind global warming and do believe very much that human induced greenhouse emissions are currently warming the Earth and melting glaciers.  However, last week (and I will have to find and post the article), I read an article that argued that solar activity is in a decreasing cycle which could override man-made change and lead to global cooling.

With the exception of July, I think 2008 has been a much cooler year across the globe.  One year by no means even remotely begins to define a trend, but it could be a start. Even Dr. Grey at the University of Colorado believes we are in a for an extended period of global cooling due to a shift in ocean currents and sea temperature.  The joining of reduced solar activity and changing ocean currents could easily override man-made effects and lead to a rapid global cooling that will re-harden glaciers and buy us many more years of carbon spewing fun!

That said, I guess what I am trying to say is... there are too many assumptions associated with global warming and too many variables (ie. sun's output and currents, etc.) that could drastically change any climate prediction model.  It is a great idea to keep reducing emissions and move towards a post carbon world, but let's not get too alarmed over Greenland's ice sheet(s). 

http://murgatroydinnov8.blogspot.com/2008/08/worry-about-global-cooling.htmlWorry About Global Cooling!
The New Scientist magazine for August 16th-22nd, which just arrived at my location, suggests that we should commit to serious and substantive action on global warming even though we are entering a cooling period, which could last for a decade or more.


Another way of putting it is this: (a) all global warming models predicting continuous warming in the 21st century; (b) they were wrong â€" it’s cooling; so (c) ignore the data and stick with the ideology, since all our models predict warming later.

Some science: An analysis of climate data by two Chinese researchers (see Zhen-Shan, L. and S. Xian. 2007. Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years. Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 95, 115â€"121) suggest that the earth’s temperature will cool for the next twenty years and that this trend started in many locations in 2000. This is an outlier â€" most others, suggest that it will cool for at least ten. Coupled with this, we see that Antarctica has an unusually high snow fall over the last several years (see Thomas, E. R., G. J. Marshall, and J. R. McConnell, 2008. A doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850. Geophysical Research Leters, 35, L01706, doi:10.1029/2007GL032529) and that it is getting more ice.
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the little ice age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada.”

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, a prolific researcher and one of Israel's top young scientists, no longer accepts the logic of man-made global warming. "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming,” Shariv wrote. "But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media." According to Dr. Shariv there is no concrete evidence â€" only speculation â€" that manmade greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence.

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, adding that the sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much of an influence on the climate â€" nor will cutbacks in future C02 emissions will matter much in terms of the climate. Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Shaviv states.

Finally, an article formally located at www.climatecentral.org and now found at www.iceagenow.com , states that should solar activity take a dive tomorrow, the temperatures would cool significantly. "Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” the article avers. "In fact, we should be more afraid of a cooling trend because of a solar minimum that will peak in 2030 that could be fairly large. As we saw from a minor solar minimum in the mid 1900s, the earth suddenly started to cool. If we were to have even a medium sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had.”


In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental Researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all. Nothing much has changed.

This is just an example of articles I have been reading lately.  COuld the global warming skeptics actually be right?  If the sun overpowers  our greenhouse emissions, then should we even care about global warming?

I have always been a very fervent believer of global warming.  If we are in fact entering a lower output sun cycle, then I think I am going to seriously reexamine my beliefs.  The ice caps may regenerate and we may not too doomed afterall.

Of course any news on global cooliing is still very preliminary, but perhaps it is not a bad idea for climatologists to start examining both sides of the argument and run some more models.