I believe that would be called Global Warming.. greenhouse
There is talk that global warming is accelerating....this seems to provide evidence that that is true.
ted
This is not necessarily evidence of accelerating global warming. Ice takes 80 calories per gram to go from a solid to a liquid at 0 degrees C. The kind of heat input needed is not likely to come from the air, it would have to come from a water current. Unless there has been a significant measured increase in water temperature, not real likely, the clear water is most likely the result of a change in currents. Now any change in currents is likely to be the result of a temperature change, but a small change in the thickness of the ice in the Bering Sea could also change the currents under the ice cap.
Now the ramifications of a complete melting of the ice cap are large. This would cause some surface currents to continue on into the Artic Sea that now skirt the edge. The good news for Europe is that the Gulf Stream probably won't be one of them, but there are ones in the Pacific that likely will be affected. The second ramification would be that there would be a source of water vapor to the north that currently doesn't exist. Some theories hold that this would greatly increase the precipitation in the northern latitudes and that would eventually lead to a new Ice Age. Regardless, there is likely to be more precipitation in the far North, whether rain or snow is not real clear. How this will affect the jetstream and other climatological phenomena that we take for granted is also unclear, shifts in the jetstream would definitely affect the track of hurricanes, for example. Any changes in the climate will affect agriculture, and the real problems here is in those poorer countries that cannot readily adapt to changes in their present agricultural situation, for good or ill.
The real concern over greenhouse gasses is not what humans can dump into the atmosphere, it is pushing the balance to the point that the real carbon sinks start to give up their carbon to the atmosphere. For example, the carbon tied up in the bogs of North America alone is enough to greatly multiply the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The same goes for the CO2 in the cold, bottom water of the oceans. If the methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 by a wide margin) tied up in the hydrates on the ocean floor were released, that could have enormous effects on the climate, possibly pushing the Earth to the point of unihabitability. And that stuff could be released by a small temperature change.
The point is that relatively small changes in a chaotic system can trigger much larger changes as the system find a new strange attractor. We may have already provided enough of a shift in the balance. On the upside (I guess), it is something that would (and has) happened sooner or later, a slight increase in volcanic action can release more CO2 and sulfur oxides than humans have to date and trigger these changes anyway... |
