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NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

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Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#191
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is being causes in large part by drought related to climate change Have an example? I thought it was a war in Syria.

There actually was a drought in Syria when that civil war started. Of course, at most that's only part of the problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-...

A significant part, when you consider that the tensions we've seen explode have existed for decades. As we saw in Egypt however, when people can't support themselves, they become desperate enough to finally act.

Sadly people in this part of the world seem to only see said events in either the rosy "Arab Spring", or some version of "Islam is fundamentally evil/unstable" sense.

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#192
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People (well, climate science researchers) have been saying that the changes are decades ahead of us, even now, but that we need to take action now and in the past to prevent these changes. Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts. We were going to see the…

> the end of arctic ice nitpick: it is actually antarctic ice we need to worry about. Arctic ice (except on Greenland) is floating and so it is already displacing its weight in water.

Melting Arctic ice also changes the surface albedo so more solar energy is absorbed, it changes the ocean salinity, and no longer cools the winds above it.

Thermal expansion of the ocean contributes almost half of total observed sea level rise. (1.1mm out of 2.8 mm total per year)

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#193
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is being causes in large part by drought related to climate change Have an example? I thought it was a war in Syria.

There actually was a drought in Syria when that civil war started. Of course, at most that's only part of the problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-...

The other parts of the problem deserve mentioned here, because they are extremely problematic and eclipse present environmental crisis and strategy.

Syrias civil war began after billions of dollars where somewhat clandestinely spent on fomenting violent revolution there - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lawma...

Libyas security collapsed after its infrastructure, including its world class irrigation system was bombed out under the guise of implementing 'no fly zone'

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always in how the numbers are used, cherry picking by both sides. However the real take away here is that they figured out they were wrong yet again. Of course they lean towards the more extreme each time but even some publications indicate that Antarctic changes are due to natural variability. Then lets play with sea rise, the fear is always that some islands will wash away and port towns will be at further ri…

I take it with a grain of salt because of the title including: "suggests" And what's the projection, will it rise 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 100, 200 or 300 meters in the next 100 years? I have seen so many numbers, I don't know what the current estimation is. Anyway I tried to make sense of the article: " This number has hovered around 0.6 inches per decade since 1900...[]...Global sea level, the paper concluded, rose no less th…

Or can someone explain these numbers otherwise (since people seem to disagree with down-votes)

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#195
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People (well, climate science researchers) have been saying that the changes are decades ahead of us, even now, but that we need to take action now and in the past to prevent these changes. Climate researchers have _not_ been implying that the bad effects are way out in the 21st century: they've made hundreds of testable predictions that catastrophe was at hand in the 80s, 90s, and aughts. We were going to see the…

>We were going to see the end of arctic ice, have a perpetual ozone hole necessitating sun screen when venturing outside and decimating wildlife from cataracts, see New York and other major cities drowned, etc. (Not to mention famine killing billions of people, etc.) You should be more careful with your information sources. I'm kind of familiar with the claims of ending arctic ice, but only from straw men claims from…

Peter Wadham, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at University of Cambridge, has repeatedly made claims that Arctic sea ice will melt "next year". Eg in 2012 he predicted it would fully melt in sept 2016. Since that didn't happen, he now predicts it will fully melt in 2017/2018. IPCC estimates it will fully melt in the late 2030s.

Articles about him in legitimate media are [1][2]. Climate deniers get to say things like [3]. Other climate scientists think he is alarmist [4], and the 2013 IPCC report mentions his papers but is super dissmissive: See section 11.3.4 of the IPCC AR5, references to Maslwoski.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-w... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/18/ice-sc... [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-a... [4] http://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/arctic-will-be-ice-fre...

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for killing the vibe of the joke, but what does that expression mean? (Non-native English speaker)

Eating beef and pork is tasty but really bad for the environment.

"really" is sort of relative here

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#198
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important thing is that 6.7 is more than ten times bigger than 0.6. Clearly you can safely ignore the words decade and century because they're words and not numbers.

How many decades are there in a century?

6.7

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always in how the numbers are used, cherry picking by both sides. However the real take away here is that they figured out they were wrong yet again. Of course they lean towards the more extreme each time but even some publications indicate that Antarctic changes are due to natural variability. Then lets play with sea rise, the fear is always that some islands will wash away and port towns will be at further ri…

This is an idiotic response at best. Are you honestly trying to say that the variations are natural? We have thousand upon thousands of years of climate details in ice cores, and while there is natural variation, the last 100 years vary more than anything else we can find in history. Here is an unbiased visual representation of all the temperature data we have from the last 20,000 years or so. Notice how the temperat…

Are you aware of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[3] The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasting less than 2,000 years. Such a repeated carbon release is in line with current global warming.[2] A main difference is that during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the planet was essentially ice-free.[4]

Today we talk about the temperature going up less than 1 degree °C in the last 1,400 years. This is talking about a period of warming that was 5-8 degrees and lasted over 20,000 years.

So when people start to talk about how rapidly things are changing over a few hundred or a thousand years, it's still a blip in the time frame of the planet's history. The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum happened over 55 million years ago and lasted more than 20,000 years. How can anybody say, "This is the warmest temps in the history of the planet!" when some of the cycles have happened over incredibly vast amounts of time and have been sustained for even longer?

And while I don't doubt some climate change is occurring, if you look at the scale in terms of millions of years, humans will be long gone before this planet really starts dying, and by then, it will reclaim, heal and move on from when we inhabited it. Truth is, the planet has been undergoing cooler and warming periods since it was born as a planet some 4 billion years ago.

Re: NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an idiotic response at best. Are you honestly trying to say that the variations are natural? We have thousand upon thousands of years of climate details in ice cores, and while there is natural variation, the last 100 years vary more than anything else we can find in history. Here is an unbiased visual representation of all the temperature data we have from the last 20,000 years or so. Notice how the temperat…

Are you aware of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C.[3] The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasti…

So what? Its not helpful to score points off of what was the 'true' maximum temperature of the planet. Here we are, now, with coastal cities in jeopardy and Antarctica melting. It will affect us, our children and grandchildren (and 100X grandchildren if you are right and it lasts 20,000 years before recovering).

I take no solace in thinking "humans will be long gone". Not if its global catastrophe in the next decades that trigger that.

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