Is Global Warming becoming unstoppable?

The Oil and Fossil Fuel Industry and those heavily invested in Oil and Fossil Fuel have a lot to answer for when it comes to spreading false and misleading information concerning Climate Change. Do they not have a conscience or a moral compass!

Darc Knight said:

Do they not have a conscience or a moral compass!

Click to expand...

Do you need to ask the question when you know the answer?

Hint : NO

One could fill a book (or an encyclopedia ..) on the effects of global warming. This one bears thinking about.

Rising seas could knock out the internet — and sooner than scientists thought
New research says 4,000 miles of internet cable could be underwater by 2030.

From severe coastal flooding to unusually destructive hurricanes, climate change-related sea level rise is being blamed for some big environmental ills. Now comes a new worry: Rising seas could flood the underground cables that carry the internet, potentially causing widespread outages.

Seawater is likely to submerge more than 4,000 miles of internet cable in the U.S. and engulf more than a thousand data centers that house servers, routers and other hardware, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon said in a paper presented July 16 at an internet conference in Montreal.


Overlap of internet infrastructure and seawater in New York, left, and Miami with average sea level rise of 6 feet.Ramakrishnan Durairajan et al / University of Oregon
The researchers identified New York, Miami and Seattle as the metropolitan areas at greatest risk for flooded internet infrastructures. Three carriers were identified as especially vulnerable: CenturyLink of Monroe, Louisiana; Chicago-based Inteliquent; and AT&T, which is based in Dallas.

“We believe that these results highlight a real and present threat to the management and operations of communications systems and that steps should be taken soon to develop plans to address this threat,” the scientists said in their paper’s conclusion.

The inundation could come within 15 years. “That was a little bit unexpected,” said study co-author Paul Barford, professor of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin. “We sort of expected that it might be parceled out over a longer period of time, but that's not the case.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/scienc...internet-sooner-scientists-thought-ncna896256

One of the world's largest glaciers is melting.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02...gigantic-cavity-in-antarctic-glacier/10785282

SirRumpole said:

One of the world's largest glaciers is melting.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02...gigantic-cavity-in-antarctic-glacier/10785282

Click to expand...

Yes, it's about to fall in anytime, if not this summer certainly the next and apparently it will cause a sea level rise pretty well instantly of two feet.

The houses on the low side where my Sister is currently trying to help her Daughter in Townsville know that on top of the current floods the future there is no more.

How long have I been telling you all to "just party" and our authorities so called in Govmint don't give fkn shite.

Suggestions any one ? ?

explod said:

Yes, it's about to fall in anytime, if not this summer certainly the next and apparently it will cause a sea level rise pretty well instantly of two feet.

Click to expand...

That's a big call Explod. What sources are suggesting that collapse of the Thwaites glacier is that close ?

This article from Wired does good job of explaining what is happening with Thwaites glacier

The Race to Understand Antarctica’s Most Terrifying Glacier
https://www.wired.com/story/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-breaking-point/

"Scientists have discovered a giant cavity at the bottom of a disintegrating glacier in Antarctica, sparking concerns that the ice sheet is melting more rapidly than expected.

Researchers working as part of a Nasa-led study found the cavern, which they said was 300 metres tall and two-thirds the size of Manhattan, at the bottom of the massive Thwaites glacier.

The space is big enough to have contained 14bn tonnes of ice and most of that ice has melted during the past three years."

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-manhattan-discovered-under-antarctic-glacier

explod said:

"Scientists have discovered a giant cavity at the bottom of a disintegrating glacier in Antarctica, sparking concerns that the ice sheet is melting more rapidly than expected.

Researchers working as part of a Nasa-led study found the cavern, which they said was 300 metres tall and two-thirds the size of Manhattan, at the bottom of the massive Thwaites glacier.

The space is big enough to have contained 14bn tonnes of ice and most of that ice has melted during the past three years."

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-manhattan-discovered-under-antarctic-glacier

Click to expand...

I saw that in the story Explod. It is (very) concerning. I don't believe there was anything else in the article that indicated the whole glacier was in imminent danger of collapse But certainly it has raised fears that the melt is quicker than thought and that collapse could be sooner rather than later.

NASA carries the ice cavity story in more detail.
I have to say that it is a worry. A few years ago the Thwaites glacier was viewed as potentially one that could collapse over a period of centuries.
Last year the researchers discovered how much water was flowing under the glacier and lifting it off the bedrock that was supporting. The rate of ice movement had doubled in a few years. They were concerned enough to demand an immediate 5 year investigation to work out just how soon this glacier could collapse.

At that stage there was serious talk of collapse as soon as 30-50 years.

The discovery of this huge ice cavity has to have scientists quickly reviewing their expectations. It is completely unexpected and suggests an exponential rate of decay that is currently not on their books.

When these glaciers collapse they go quick. There is every likelihood that a significant collapse of part of the glacier will crate a domino effect Basically 300 foot high ice cliffs cannot easily support themselves.

(Might be time to start selling the beach house and the beach side mansions)

Huge Cavity in Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7322
________________________________
There are some really cool stories on that NASA sight.

There was another story on the NASA website which should ring alarm bells.

It concerned a huge landslide that happened in California after the succession of droughts and then extreme rains.
There are similarities with the potential collapse of the Thwaites glacier. Essentially extreme conditions weakening an environment which is already moving (land or glacier) which then collapses into a new more stable form.

The landslide had in fact been happening slowly for a long time. But after the floods everything just came unstuck.
Drought, Deluge Turned Stable Landslide into Disaster

Stable landslide" sounds like a contradiction in terms, but there are indeed places on Earth where land has been creeping downhill slowly, stably and harmlessly for as long as a century. But stability doesn't necessarily last forever. For the first time, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and collaborating institutions have documented the transition of a stable, slow-moving landslide into catastrophic collapse, showing how drought and extreme rains likely destabilized the slide.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7329

"
...He certainly has his allies. Richard Alley, a well known glaciologist at Penn State University who has published with DeConto and Pollard, wrote in an email that "cliff retreat is not some strange and unexpected physical process; it is happening now in some places, has happened in the past, and is expected wherever sufficiently high temperatures occur in ocean or air around ice flowing into the ocean."

The Eemian - but worse?

There's one important thing to consider - the Eemian occurred without humans emitting lots of greenhouse gases.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide was far lower than it is today. The event was instead driven by changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun, leading to more sunlight falling on the northern hemisphere.

The big difference, this time around, is that humans are heating things up far faster than what is believed to have happened in the geologic past.

And that makes a key difference, said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic researcher who is leading the US side of an international multimillion dollar mission to study Thwaites Glacier, and who is a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.

"The current pace of climate change is very fast," Scambos said, and the rate of warming might cause glaciers to behave differently than they did in the past.

Accordingly, Scambos says he sees the current debate as fruitful - "it's the discussion that needs to happen" - but that it doesn't lessen his worry about the fate of Thwaites Glacier if it retreats far enough.

"There's no model that says the glacier won't accelerate if it gets into those conditions," said Scambos. "It just has to."

Humans were nowhere near the Antarctic in the Eemian - and we have never, in the modern period, seen a glacier as big as Thwaites retreat. It's possible something is going to happen that we don't have any precedent or predictions for.

Just last week, for instance, scientists reported a large cavity opening beneath one part of the glacier - something they said models could not have predicted.

There is a massive stake involved now in at least trying to figure out what could happen - before it actually does. It will help determine whether humans, now organized and industrialized and masters of fossil fuels, are poised to drive a repeat of our own geological history.

2019 © The Washington Post"

https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-...15-000-years-ago-when-the-sea-was-much-higher

explod said:

Yes, it's about to fall in anytime, if not this summer certainly the next and apparently it will cause a sea level rise pretty well instantly of two feet.

The houses on the low side where my Sister is currently trying to help her Daughter in Townsville know that on top of the current floods the future there is no more.

How long have I been telling you all to "just party" and our authorities so called in Govmint don't give fkn shite.

Suggestions any one ? ?

Click to expand...

Everyone in the World, stand on the coast, with a bucket. When the glacier falls, everyone fill a bucket, put them in the sun and let evaporation sort it.

https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/20050801_floatingice.html

The one good thing about all this debate, it is keeping a lot of people in a job, which is a good thing.

snow in Hawaii -------------------------------

12 February 2019
Arctic sea ice has been in decline for decades, according to a new scientific paper
https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/arc...ecline-decades-according-new-scientific-paper

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nyas.13856

If you really want to understand what we are facing with CC, what has happened, what needs to happen Greta Thunbergs TED talk last year is about the best I have ever seen.

Another large chunk of ice is about to come adrift in Antarctica. Apparently this is not quite normal for this region..

Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica
Once a rapidly spreading rift intersects with another fissure, an iceberg of at least 660sq miles is set to be loosened, Nasa says

...This process, also known as calving, occurs naturally with ice shelves but “recent changes are unfamiliar in this area” and could lead to the destabilization of the Brunt ice shelf, Nasa warned.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/26/iceberg-break-away-antarctica-ice-shelf

The more we learn about global warming the worse it looks.
About 12-15 years ago scientists started to talk about tipping points. This was opening the conversation about how particular eco systems could change in a way that accelerated CC . For example the melting of Arctic ice meant that more heat from the sun would penetrate the ocean (rather than be reflected by ice ), raising temperatures further and melting more ice and so on.

Latest analysis is scary....

These clouds could go extinct, drastically speeding up warming, modelling suggests


Thursday 28 February 2019 4:45pm

• Mail
• Twitter
• Facebook

Within less than 150 years the Earth's climate could warm to a level similar to 56 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic and parts of the equator were uninhabitable for warm-blooded creatures, according to new climate change modelling.

The study published in Nature Geoscience models how very high levels of CO2 affect the formation of stratocumulus clouds - the low, flat decks that cover about 20 per cent of subtropical oceans and reflect about 30 per cent the sun's light.

Stratocumulus clouds.

After two years of supercomputer calculations, the researchers observed a sudden transition when the simulated CO2 in the atmosphere passed 1200 parts per million. The stratocumulous clouds broke apart and disappeared, leaving blue skies.

This would cause a sudden spike in temperature as the heat that would have been reflected into space would be absorbed by the ocean instead.

The loss of stratocumulus clouds would add another 8C of warming on top of the amount already predicted, the researchers concluded.
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/prog...o-extinct-speeding-up-global-warming/10858850

This article encompasses a lot of my own feelings and well expressed, but it's from a young person's perspective, just an excerpt but recommend the entire article :-

"I started working in the climate change advocacy world somewhat by accident when I got a job editing policy for an environmental advocacy organization. I cared about the earth, of course, but I wasn’t a hardcore environmentalist.

I spent my first year deeply immersed in detailed reports on climate policy. No detail was spared. Day in and day out, I read about the reckless course we were on and all the foolish ways we were digging our hole even deeper. It was terrifying.

I had known climate change was real. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent  people were already suffering hideously. Pick a natural disaster — wildfire, hurricane, mudslide, or heat wave, many of which research shows have already been exacerbated by climate change — it’s always the people with the least to lose who get hurt the most. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances. Right at that very moment.

I knew I would see bad things accelerate in my lifetime, but I didn’t know it was going to happen before I turned 50. Nor did I realize how many of them I’d actually already seen. After all, I was with my mother in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina and here in New York during Sandy. And if you’re thinking that climate change and hurricanes aren’t related, they’re not exactly divorced either.

My stages of grief
I didn’t know it then, but that first year I spent reading policy papers, I went into mourning. I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears, and I’d refuse to admit to myself that I knew exactly why I was crying"

https://www.vox.com/first-person/20...SKm-9o-3n0LJIzaCfKZfheb6Pn3upfbqk1DiC8YAh916Y

explod said:

This article encompasses a lot of my own feelings and well expressed, but it's from a young person's perspective, just an excerpt but recommend the entire article

Click to expand...

I could sum up the problem by saying I've met many who are concerned, some extremely so, but few who are willing to take action unless government forces them.

Now, if you're not willing to do something without being forced well then actions speak louder than words and it says an awful lot.

Reality is that if it involves buying something then 9 times out of 10 it's part of the problem not the solution. Cutting back consumption isn't a popular idea however.

Smurf1976 said:

I could sum up the problem by saying I've met many who are concerned, some extremely so, but few who are willing to take action unless government forces them.

Now, if you're not willing to do something without being forced well then actions speak louder than words and it says an awful lot.

Reality is that if it involves buying something then 9 times out of 10 it's part of the problem not the solution. Cutting back consumption isn't a popular idea however.

Click to expand...

Interesting response.
In my view the overwhelming trouble with CC is the size of the problem and having to acknowledge it's reality and out need to respond to it (unless we are happy to cook us and our planet) . It's true most of us don't really want to know about problems. That's human nature. But there are consequences to this deliberate avoidance.

I can see a point about "buying something being part of the problem". But frankly re engineering our world to live within our ecological footprint as well as undoing the disasters we have already created will require massive investment. But we certainly need less stuff in our lives..