Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the US were split into the 50 states, you would have to get 50 governments separately to agree to carbon regulations, instead of one. Sure, but then about half of those would actually do something about it. Of course, the other half would keep thumping the Bible or Atlas Shrugged (or both), but even so that's a fraction of the current level of inaction.
The Bible gives no good reason to deny climate change. The leaders of the two largest Christian groups, the Catholic Popes (specifically Benedict XVI and Francis) and the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, have long been supporters of green policies.
West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
111–120 of 141 posts
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bible gives no good reason to deny climate change. The leaders of the two largest Christian groups, the Catholic Popes (specifically Benedict XVI and Francis) and the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, have long been supporters of green policies.
I know. It's largely the literalists that go off the really deep end.
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#113This is why big countries suck. They are slow to change and a wrong move is horribly damaging. Look at the US or China, no matter how I or all my countrymen live in Sweden it won't really matter if climate change deniers get in charge in the US for example. I just think it's so sad to see everything go to shit due to some greedy assholes that won't invest in solutions that are effective AND sustainable. I plan to bec…
China halts work on partly built coal plants. http://dailytimes.com.pk/business/23-Oct-16/china-axes-part-...
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... just a ploy ... Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1732/
I get all my scientific knowledge from comics on the Internet too.
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#115What's the best way to profit from rising sea levels? Investing in land that's higher up in our nearby coastal cities?
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#116Bloomberg rarely does proper math. Melt both polar caps and the ice of Greenland, and you barely get global sea level rise by very few inches. Antarctics as a whole is 90% of the world land-based ice. 29 mln cubic km. All of the floating ice is around 3 mln cubic km. It may look that it can cause 60m high sea level rise, but most of this will be evaporated into milder global climate and stronger rivers. We shall have…
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#117This is why big countries suck. They are slow to change and a wrong move is horribly damaging. Look at the US or China, no matter how I or all my countrymen live in Sweden it won't really matter if climate change deniers get in charge in the US for example. I just think it's so sad to see everything go to shit due to some greedy assholes that won't invest in solutions that are effective AND sustainable. I plan to bec…
Yeah, for the small countries that have no influence whatsoever. Sweden once also was a great country (I doubt you would have complained back then) but it overextended in its wars and got basically castrated by the Russian Empire.
I believe you have other problems in Sweden right now after your men allowed your country to be invaded.
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#118Investment in coastal flood prevention technology for major city centers that can legitimately be helped. Places below sea level today - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_on_land_with_el... - need to be abandoned.
Won't a lot of this coastal flood protection infrastructure just add emissions to the atmosphere, thus grossly exacerbating the problem? Seems like way to little, way to late. Trying to just "build a wall" around cities just doesn't sound like it's going to work, I even saw designs where buildings in Manhattan will have to be built on stilts, but how much environmental environmental damage will all this new construct…
Sea levels will rise by a meter over the next hundred years. That's really not very much in the scheme of things.
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#119What's the best way to profit from rising sea levels? Investing in land that's higher up in our nearby coastal cities?
Renewable energy. Once things get bad enough the world will wake up and renewables will become huge.
Is wealth going to be made on installing rather than manufacturing hardware? It's also hard to see how e.g. SolarCity protects its margins from competition with other installers. Customer acquisition is a big chunk of costs right now, but if SolarCity spends a bunch on ads to get Americans thinking about rooftop solar that helps competing installers too. Look at the Australian market for a glimpse at the future (much lower installation costs, much higher penetration, broad consumer awareness without further advertising).
EDIT: my own best guess is that if there's going to be a breakout company that achieves high margins on cleantech it's going to be in the area of storage. That's because a patented approach that can seriously lower storage costs or increase cycle life (which amounts to practically the same thing for stationary storage) is an advantage that can't be immediately cloned. OTOH I do not expect protected margins for companies that are lowering costs by scaling, e.g. Tesla's battery gigafactory. Historical reminder: at the beginning of the 2000s China had no solar PV industry to speak of. In less than a decade Chinese manufacturers went to dominating the market because IP barriers were minimal and they could scale larger very quickly once there was a state commitment.
Re: West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard of Northern Antarctica. The questions was about West Antarctica, which makes total sense since the globe is laterally made up of a western and eastern hemisphere. But since Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere, talking about Northern Antarctica doesn't make much sense other than talking about any point away from the south pole. Maybe you are confused by the concept of a hemisphere?
I am merely objecting to referring to the "Western" part of a landmass that occupies a complete parallel line. Talking about the laterality of a quasi-spherical object is tenuous, as well.
When using systems of coordinates that require an arbitrary choice of origin point, one generally has to simply state what the choice is.
For the system of coordinates being discussed in this thread, the origin point is defined as the prime meridian, and it forms half of one of an infinite number of geodesics that bisect Antarctica. But because that particular geodesic is elevated to a special status by an arbitrary choice in the setting of the system of coordinates, when using that system of coordinates, it is perfectly reasonable -- under the conventions of that system -- to discuss masses that would be on one half or the other of the planet if it were divided into two parts through that geodesic.
But nobody seriously argues that the geodesic is in any way special physically compared to the infinity of others passing through the same two points (near the mean rotational poles); the Prime Meridian is a convention, and so an eastern and western hemisphere each bounded by a plane perpendicular to the meridian extended to a great circle.
Moreover, there is nothing special about this particular system of coordinates on the Earth, and the Prime Meridian does not really even have much local meaning more than a few metres away from the Greenwich Observatory, which is firmly set in what locals universally call "East London" or even "South-East London".
So, "Western Antarctica" is simply absorbing a particular choice of coordinate system on the Earth, which in turn has a defined origin point for one axis that was chosen arbitrarily. The label "Western Antarctica" is not invariant under a change of coordinates (whether by changing where there Prime Meridian is by an angle that (in radians) is not an integer factor of \pi, or by changing to a wholly different set of coordinates that use different axes altogether), and so isn't a physical feature of Antarctica, but then there's nothing physical -- in the sense of invariant under change of coordinates -- about the U.S. midwest, or Western Australia either.
However, conventional sets of coordinates on any physical system make descriptions of coordinate-invariant features easy for people who accept the convention, and understand its features and limits. (For instance, the lat-long-alt system is not very useful very close to the coordinate singularity; but that singularity vanishes under change of coordinates, and it is only a deliberate choice in matching the coordinate singularity to a point near the (approximate) line of (approximate) axisymmetry that leads to confusion like the one that appears to be gripping you when dealing with features near the coordinate singularities.)