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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (35368)	8/7/2012 5:56:56 PM
From: Land Shark	Respond to of 36921

7 August 12 Arctic Ice Decline Much Worse Than Expected As the extent of Arctic sea ice declines to levels unrecorded since satellite monitoring began, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has released a new analysis that shows the situation to be worse by far than even the most pessimistic models predicted. It's a perverse endorsement of one of the most popular denier memes - that you can't rely on climate models because the world is too complicated to be reduced to a compilation of computer data. But, thanks to the expertise (and conservative nature) of the scientists behind this work, the models have shown the direction with perfect accuracy: it's the terrifying extent that they have failed to anticipate. In addition to the catastrophic conditions currently prevailing in the Arctic, the NSIDC has also drawn attention to the dramatic melting occurring this year in Greenland. And all this is supported and reinforced by the Polar Science Center's ongoing calculation of Arctic ice volume. The trends are all down. Or as James Hansen put it in the Washington Post last week, "Climate change is here - and it's worse than we thought."

To: Eric who wrote (35368)	8/7/2012 6:28:54 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

"Realistically, we cannot sit here on Earth and deliberately mess our climate in order to test the models," Maybe not, but we sure can do it standing up.

To: Eric who wrote (35368)	8/8/2012 7:16:18 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 36921

If they want to know about carbon on Earth, they would do better to study carbon on Earth, not Mars. <Paul Niles is also working with the NASA team. He is a planetary geologist and analytical geochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center who watched the touch-down with his family in Los Angeles. "One of the things that Curiosity is going to help us learn much more about is... How does carbon cycle through the system? Where does it go? Where does it end up? Does it ever come back again? Is it ever buried deep enough that it come back again from volcanoes?" > "Curiosity" is not going to provide any help about carbon cycling through Earth's system. Where does it go, end up, come back again, get buried deep enough ... ? The get the answer to that is to answer the question, "Where did it come from?" So, for example, carbon in limestone in a limestone cave dissolves and flows to the ocean, where it turns into fish, shells, other marine life and finally into sediment on the ocean floor, where it accumulates as it's trundled under the ocean to plate boundaries where it is subducted. The light parts float up and chemically react under huge pressure and high temperature. Some of the carbon which floats up is caught in volcanic magma chambers and provides fuel for fantastic and not so fantastic explosive eruptions. Some of the carbon which floats up is caught in sedimentary layers and provides oil and gas for people to collect and recycle. Some escapes to the surface in leaks and is reprocessed in the atmosphere or in liquid action at ground level, heading back into the sea some time later after going through some ecological cycles. There you have the answers. Please send $2 billion as my fee for providing the answers before Curiosity could tell you anything about what happens on Mars, which is irrelevant to Earth. Mqurice