And now for something important: the globe has an ~20% chance of hitting the global warming 1.5C target in the next 5 years by 1KIKI

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/world-climate-change-chance-exce
eding-15c-met-offie-a4493146.html

https://in.news.yahoo.com/climate-change-rising-chance-exceeding-01545
2057.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/09/world/global-temperatures-wmo-clima
te-intl-scli/index.html

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 10:59 AM

Well...

You just had 3 months of China and india putting out near zero pollutants, and at least 2 months where driving anywhere in the US was a dream because nobody was on the road, and that didn't seem to help.

Looks like it's over.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 11:36 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Thanks for the bump.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 11:42 AM

No worries.

I'm just hoping The Coomph takes us out before the world lights on fire is all.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 11:58 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Oddly enough the best way to reduce the population is to improve the standard of living. It's a biological response that under stress, people have more children, rather than fewer. But under good conditions, birth rate drops - a fact bemoaned by nativists around the world who note the low birthrates of established populations in Europe and Japan.

What keeps us from improving lives and at the same time improving the environment is our economic system that doesn't fully reward people for their work, but instead siphons off their benefits to a very few in the form of profits.

You'd be better off looking for an economic paradigm shift, instead of hoping for a sub-total human extermination, whose numbers will be quickly replaced by very high birthrates in response to stress.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 12:01 PM

True, but also not without its consequences...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 12:03 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

People and mice don't respond the same way.

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 12:40 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Among other things, SIX, with higher living standards and increased status for women (a society where they can gain an education, inherit and own property, and have access to birth control and abortion) women who can CHOOSE not to have children, and who have other options in their lives besides being sex objects and mothers, often choose not to have children.

It's simple, really.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 12:44 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So what does this say to those libertarians and die-hard pro-corporatists who've been saying that we should be worried about global COOLING because the sun has reached another "Maunder minimum" (prolonged period of quietude)?

Are we seeing any global cooling yet?

HINT: No.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 9:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
People and mice don't respond the same way.

Yes. Yes they do.

You haven't been paying attention to 2020, apparently.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 9, 2020 11:06 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
1KIKI:
People and mice don't respond the same way.

SIX: Yes. Yes they do.
You haven't been paying attention to 2020, apparently.

No, they don't. If you knew a shred of history you'd realize that human societies learn and change over generations, unlike mice. That is why our birth rate is amenable to change with the right incentives in place... unlike mice.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Friday, July 10, 2020 11:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
1KIKI:
People and mice don't respond the same way.

SIX: Yes. Yes they do.
You haven't been paying attention to 2020, apparently.

No, they don't. If you knew a shred of history you'd realize that human societies learn and change over generations, unlike mice. That is why our birth rate is amenable to change with the right incentives in place... unlike mice.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

Watch the video.

It didn't take too many generations for the entire colony to collapse on several occasions when the right conditions were met. Mice and rats are not purely instinctually driven. Especially not when forced into a confined area where they are forced to be much more social creatures than they otherwise would if allowed to roam free.

In the experiments two things happened that aren't very far removed from what is happening to humans now...

1. They reached peak capacity for the "world" they lived in.

2. They were given everything they needed to survive.

Note, that I didn't say that they were given a nice life. Just the basic necessities of food in their belly, a predator free space to live in, and and a shield from the elements.

I can guarantee you that nearly everybody that I communicate with on this board and IRL, if not all of you, do far more than "exist" and have only become accustomed to many things that you think you cannot live without and take for granted.

How do I know that? I can manage to live quite comfortably on around only $4,500 per year, and that's including property taxes and car insurance. You, yourself, have even suggested recently that I am feral.

And you're never going to hear me bitching about how shitty my life is compared to people in places like Africa and poorer areas of China where even most of them have it infinitely better than their own ancestors did.

Seriously. I know it's long, but watch the video. I think you'll actually find it quite enjoyable.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 2:44 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Originally posted

blah blah blah

Do ~~Right~~ Wrong, Be ~~Right~~ Wrong. :)

fify

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 3:01 AM

Illegitimate argument, dummy.

I was talking to Sigs. I'm done conversing with halfwits.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 4:09 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You yourself pointed out one major difference between mice and humans - they're asocial, whereas humans are social. That's why under stress the human birth rates INCREASE, instead of decreasing. Humans are geared towards survival of their group in opposition to other groups. And the one way to do that in conflict is to have more people.

Another major difference is humans have language, which tells us what our reality means.

Another major difference is that humans have human-created physical accumulation over time, which shapes our societies. Our tools, our homes, our streets, etc define what we will do and how we'll live.

And so on.

There are far too many vital differences between primates and rodents to equate one with the other.

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 10:56 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You yourself pointed out one major difference between mice and humans - they're asocial, whereas humans are social. That's why under stress the human birth rates INCREASE, instead of decreasing. Humans are geared towards survival of their group in opposition to other groups. And the one way to do that in conflict is to have more people.

The birth rates of many animals also increase under stressful situations for the same reasons. They also decrease for many of the same reasons as well.

Quote:
Another major difference is humans have language, which tells us what our reality means.

We're able to express ourselves far better than any animals out there for sure, but that doesn't mean that mice or rats (or any other group of animals) doesn't have the ability to communicate to each other their situation or their limited scope on reality. If you saw the behavior of the raccoon family I babysat for three hours a few weeks ago, I think it would be quite eye opening for you.

Quote:
Another major difference is that humans have human-created physical accumulation over time, which shapes our societies. Our tools, our homes, our streets, etc define what we will do and how we'll live.

And so on.

There are far too many vital differences between primates and rodents to equate one with the other.

I'm not saying that HUMANS = RATS in a total and definitive sense.

But there are certainly many parallels, both on an individual basis and especially when looking at society and social behavior patterns, if given the right circumstances.

And just like you said here about humans:

Quote:
Another major difference is that humans have human-created physical accumulation over time, which shapes our societies. Our tools, our homes, our streets, etc define what we will do and how we'll live.

The mice and the rats in the experiments showed quite a bit of odd tenancies that were very atypical of their behavior in the wild when raised for generations in a finite "world" built for them where all of the basic needs for survival that they'd usually have to risk their lives for everyday were provided for them.

Especially interesting to me were the proliferation of odd behaviors to the point where those running the experiments actually put them into different named classes. It's quite possible that some of these odd behaviors do happen among the rat and mouse population given the right circumstances in the wild, but they would never be passed on and/or the ones showing the odd behaviors would die almost immediately from predators and/or they'd be outcast from their society.

I think a highlight to me in the video was the point in time during one of the experiments where they marked the death of the last "elder" male rat who was capable and/or had any desire at all to procreate.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 10:59 AM

Interestingly too, the experiments in the video were the inspiration for Robert C. O'Brien's "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH", which was later adapted into the cartoon The Secret of NIMH by Don Bluth.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 1:53 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Interestingly too, the experiments in the video were the inspiration for Robert C. O'Brien's "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH", which was later adapted into the cartoon The Secret of NIMH by Don Bluth.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Here is a modification of the rat experiment that makes it approximately the same as what humanity is doing to itself: seal the rats into a container where no carbon dioxide leaves their breathing air. After a while, some rats die from suffocation. In the case of humans, where the container is huge, some will die of heatstroke before they suffocate. You'd think that all the humans would be willing to pay to remove CO2 from their air, but in reality only a very few pay, with the rest of humanity expecting free air.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 2:11 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Here is a modification of the rat experiment that makes it approximately the same as what humanity is doing to itself: seal the rats into a container where no carbon dioxide leaves their breathing air. After a while, some rats die from suffocation. In the case of humans, where the container is huge, some will die of heatstroke before they suffocate. You'd think that all the humans would be willing to pay to remove CO2 from their air, but in reality only a very few pay, with the rest of humanity expecting free air.

Actually ... not at all true. To give you a rough idea of normal CO2, atmospheric CO2 is roughly 500ppm today. When I started analyzing atmospheric CO2 (among other things) 35 years ago it was 350ppm.

In any case, the Navy is very interested in how high can they let CO2 get in the submarines, since generating oxygen is quiet and efficient, but scrubbing CO2 is noisy, bulky, and energy intensive. Results posted online have shown breathing air CO2 can go as high as 20,000ppm with no ill effects.

CO2 causes a lot of problems with global warming, ocean acidification, and other environmental problems, but suffocation isn't one of them.

Suffocation happens when oxygen is too low, or when lungs are damaged and oxygen can't pass through the alveoli into the bloodstream.

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 2:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
Here is a modification of the rat experiment that makes it approximately the same as what humanity is doing to itself: seal the rats into a container where no carbon dioxide leaves their breathing air. After a while, some rats die from suffocation. In the case of humans, where the container is huge, some will die of heatstroke before they suffocate. You'd think that all the humans would be willing to pay to remove CO2 from their air, but in reality only a very few pay, with the rest of humanity expecting free air.
Actually ... not at all true. To give you a rough idea of normal CO2, atmospheric CO2 is roughly 500ppm today. When I started analyzing atmospheric CO2 (among other things) 35 years ago it was 350ppm.

In any case, the Navy is very interested in how high can they let CO2 get in the submarines, since generating oxygen is quiet and efficient, but scrubbing CO2 is noisy, bulky, and energy intensive. Results posted online have shown breathing air CO2 can go as high as 20,000ppm with no ill effects.

CO2 causes a lot of problems with global warming, ocean acidification, and other environmental problems, but suffocation isn't one of them.

Suffocation happens when oxygen is too low, or when lungs are damaged and oxygen can't pass through the alveoli into the bloodstream.

Seal humans in a world with 20,000 ppm CO2 and they will cook, but think of all the money they saved by dumping CO2 into the air for free instead of costly disposal!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 5:13 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You yourself pointed out one major difference between mice and humans - they're asocial, whereas humans are social. That's why under stress the human birth rates INCREASE, instead of decreasing. Humans are geared towards survival of their group in opposition to other groups. And the one way to do that in conflict is to have more people.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The birth rates of many animals also increase under stressful situations for the same reasons.

Generally, no. Under stress, studies indicate that birth rates of laboratory rodents goes down.
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2307/1934260
https://www.publish.csiro.au/ZO/ZO9540009

Quote:
kiki - Another major difference is humans have language, which tells us what our reality means.

Quote:
jack - We're able to express ourselves far better than any animals out there for sure, but that doesn't mean that mice or rats (or any other group of animals) doesn't have the ability to communicate to each other their situation or their limited scope on reality. If you saw the behavior of the raccoon family I babysat for three hours a few weeks ago, I think it would be quite eye opening for you.

Our language can tell people that it's far better to kill yourself than live as a disgraced person (for example). I can't think of any animal that commits socially-determined suicide besides people.

Quote:
kiki - Another major difference is that humans have human-created physical accumulation over time, which shapes our societies. Our tools, our homes, our streets, etc define what we will do and how we'll live.

Quote:
jack - I'm not saying that HUMANS = RATS in a total and definitive sense.

But there are certainly many parallels, both on an individual basis and especially when looking at society and social behavior patterns, if given the right circumstances.

Such as?

Quote:
jack - And just like you said here about humans: "kiki - Another major difference is that humans have human-created physical accumulation over time, which shapes our societies. Our tools, our homes, our streets, etc define what we will do and how we'll live."

Quote:
jack - The mice and the rats in the experiments showed quite a bit of odd tenancies that were very atypical of their behavior in the wild when raised for generations in a finite "world" built for them where all of the basic needs for survival that they'd usually have to risk their lives for everyday were provided for them.

I have to point out that laboratory rodents like rats, mice, and rabbits, have been SO highly selected and bred to 1) reduce individual differences but create distinctive strains, and 2) domesticate them to be amenable to being handled by humans, that even in basic behavior (fear of people for example) they in no way resemble their wild ancestors.
This overall domestication effect has even been observed in silver foxes bred for friendliness, and even includes changes in facial structure, fur coloration and type, body characteristics, diurnal cycles, as well as friendliness and overall behavior.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~bio156/Papers/PDFs/Bioessays%202009%20Trut
.pdf
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/08/fox-dogs-wild-tame-
genetics-study-news/
In addition, I thought I'd add that they're usually kept at sub-optimal temperatures (people-appropriate, not rodent-appropriate which would be much higher) which alone changes their behavior and physiology; and that they're usually observed, trained, and tested during the day, which is highly disruptive to normal behavior since they're nocturnal animals. What I'm saying is that highly inbred, domesticated lab rats and mice (and rabbits) don't behave like their wild ancestors in general.
Scientists can't even draw hard and fast behavior comparisons between bonobo chimps and regular chimps, that are highly related; and either or both of them compared to humans, even though those 2 species are the most closely related primates to humans.

Quote:
jack - Especially interesting to me were the proliferation of odd behaviors to the point where those running the experiments actually put them into different named classes. It's quite possible that some of these odd behaviors do happen among the rat and mouse population given the right circumstances in the wild, but they would never be passed on and/or the ones showing the odd behaviors would die almost immediately from predators and/or they'd be outcast from their society.

see above

Quote:
I think a highlight to me in the video was the point in time during one of the experiments where they marked the death of the last "elder" male rat who was capable and/or had any desire at all to procreate.

But other experiments show that when you reduce the population density, behavior in the population 'normalizes' till the density increases again.

I also want to point out some potential mechanisms for those behaviors one finds in laboratory rodents, but not in people. Neither rats nor mice control their bladders. As they run and scamper around, they piddle everywhere, leaving trails of urine. Those trails are visual and olfactory cues about where they were when, and who else was there when. In crowded conditions, those cues may be obscured under the general welter of trails, leading to overall stress. So it may not be the presence per se of other individuals, or just the presence of other individuals, but the absence of reliable markers by which they navigate physically and socially.

On the basis of one video, no, you have not proved to me that the large amount of contrary data is immaterial.

eta: So, overall, it's still true that under stress - lack of water, lack of food, overcrowding - the birth rate of animals goes down. OTOH it's been well-documented over many decades that people, under stress - war, economic uncertainty, privation - increase their birth rate; while under better conditions the birth rate goes down (the demographic transition).

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 5:44 PM

You still haven't watched the video. That much is apparent from your response.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 6:31 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1962-calhoun.pdf

I read the paper, which had a lot more details. The environment he set up was EXTREMELY artificial, geared towards maximizing stress at every opportunity - at getting food, water, and nesting, at traversing the space (one-way-in-and-out pathways), at it's lack of environmental richness and so on. Then he failed to reproduce the worst effects of his original experiment. And finally, it was a detailed description of rat behavior. Nowhere did he draw any parallels to humans.

But he does spend a number of pages making my case for me: under stress, birth rate (or, successful birthing and weaning of offspring) goes down.

Later experiments disproved some of his original conclusions, and broke links to urban, crowded humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636191/

And finally, it's a many decade-long series of HUMAN measurements that as basic physical and social living conditions go down reproduction goes up - and the other way around (demographic transition).

I'm not convinced by the experiment, since a better environment more geared towards fulfilling rat needs might have avoided the effects that were attributed to 'overcrowding'.

A couple of decades ago I read of an experiment in a Science News article called 'Drinking to Forget'. It's been observed in the wild that some elephants prefer overripe (fermented!!) fruit. So a setup was created in a zoo where subtle social stressors were put in place. As I recall, they limited to water to two small sources (there was plenty of water, it was just crowded), and similarly they limited the food to one small area (again, there was plenty but it was harder to access). Lower ranked animals had to wait their turn. BTW, this is a highly abnormal situation compared to the wild, where food and water are generally spread out and accessible to all over many locations. (This is similar to Goodall's inadvertent chimp experiment where she piled fruit in one pile unlike in the wild where ripe fruit is scattered over many trees. Goodall then spent many months observing wildly hierarchical behavior not seen anywhere else, before she realized her mistake and scattered to fruit around.) Anyway, one water source was spiked with - I can't remember if it was 3% or 5% alcohol, which is about the alcohol level in naturally fermented fruit. More of the lower ranked elephants who were under mild social stress drank more of the spiked water than the higher ranked elephants (who, iirc, didn't drink the spiked water at all).

Anyway, by creating an abnormal environment, one can create stress in animals, whether or not there's plenty of food or water or even space. So the conditions of the original rat experiment don't speak to me of stress from 'overcrowding' as much as of stress from an overall brutally designed environment geared towards maximizing all kinds of stress not related to overall numbers in the space.

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Saturday, July 11, 2020 7:16 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/weather/siberia-arctic-temperature-
wildfires-intl/index.html

Siberia had its warmest June ever as wildfires raged and carbon dioxide emissions surged

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 12:11 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Earth's climate destiny finally seen more clearly
Landmark study narrows bounds for "climate sensitivity," ruling out benign warming.

Summary

It seems like such a simple question: How hot is Earth going to get? For 40 years, climate scientists have repeated the same unsatisfying answer: If humans double atmospheric carbon dioxide from preindustrial levels, the planet will eventually warm between 1.5°C and 4.5°C—a temperature range that encompasses everything from a merely troubling rise to a catastrophic one. In a landmark effort, a team of scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. The work will feed into the next major U.N. report on climate change and, ultimately, inform projections of sea-level rise, economic damage, and much else.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6502/354

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 12:41 AM

My money is on global warming.

Have fun wearing the mask in 5 years when your average temp went up 10 degrees on any given day.

I will refuse then, just as I refuse today.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 12:47 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

And even if every old person were to die off tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing.

Thanks for displaying your extreme double standard.

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 12:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And even if every old person were to die off tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing.

Thanks for displaying your extreme double standard.

Still have no idea what you're talking about with the double standard thing.

At this point I'm going to assume that you have no idea what the definition of doxxing and double standards are. Just like you've already proven you have no idea what the definition of ignore is either.

But you're right. We'd need a lot more than just the old people to go if you're going to stop global warming. A lot more.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 2:54 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Putting you on 'ignore'.

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Wednesday, July 29, 2020 3:10 PM

Starting to think that Kiki doesn't know how words work.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 7:20 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Putting you on 'ignore'.

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 9:50 AM

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 2:07 PM

REAVERFAN

Senators Held a Bizarre Hearing About How to Solve Climate Change With More Fossil Fuels
https://earther.gizmodo.com/senators-held-a-bizarre-hearing-about-how-
to-solve-clim-1844535872

Welcome to Bizarro world. Thanks, Trump!

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Thursday, July 30, 2020 4:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Senators Held a Bizarre Hearing About How to Solve Climate Change With More Fossil Fuels
https://earther.gizmodo.com/senators-held-a-bizarre-hearing-about-how-
to-solve-clim-1844535872

Welcome to Bizarro world. Thanks, Trump!

Fight Climate change with Climate Change?

Must have gotten that out of the 2020 Democrat's fight Fascism with Fascism playbook.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 5:28 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/05/weather/st-patrick-bay-ice-caps-cli
mate-change-trnd-scn/index.html

Two Canadian Arctic ice caps have completely disappeared, satellite imagery shows

New satellite images from NASA show that Canada's St. Patrick Bay ice caps have completely disappeared.
"I can't say I was terribly surprised because we knew they were going, but it has happened really fast," Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told CNN. Serreze co-authored a paper in 2017 estimating the ice caps would be gone within five years.
The very hot temperatures in the summer of 2015 reduced the longevity of the St. Patrick's Bay ice caps. "You could really see they got hit. But that heat has really just not stopped. It's just getting too warm," Serreze told CNN.
There are other glaciers near the now gone St. Patrick's Bay ice caps, such as the Murray and Simmons ice caps, which sit at a higher elevation. They have also been shrinking significantly.
"I'll make another prediction that they're gone in a decade," Serreze said.
Small ice caps in the Arctic are very sensitive indicators of the effects of climate change, according to Serreze.
"There's something called 'Arctic amplification,' which refers to the observation -- not the theory -- that the Arctic is warming up at a much faster rate than the rest of the globe, anywhere from two to four times faster," Serreze said. "We are starting to see all these things come together. The disappearance of the St. Patrick's Bay ice caps is "an exclamation point of what's happening in the Arctic," Serreze added.

https://phys.org/news/2020-07-canadian-ice-caps-scientific.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/53647640

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8580647/Satellite-imag
es-reveal-two-ice-caps-Canadian-Arctic-disappeared.html

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020 7:14 PM

Cool.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, August 20, 2020 1:56 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Massive ice melt in Greenland last year shattered previous records, study says

By Associated Press
Aug. 20, 2020
8:48 AM

Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than four feet of water, a new study said.

After two years when summer ice melt had been minimal, last summer shattered all records with 586 billion tons of ice melting, according to satellite measurements reported in a study published Thursday. That’s more than 140 trillion gallons of water.

The loss is far more than the yearly average of 259 billion tons of ice since 2003, and it easily surpasses the previous record of 511 billion tons in 2012, researchers wrote in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

The study also showed that there were many years in the 20th century when Greenland actually gained ice.

Last year’s Greenland melt added 0.06 inches to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount, but “in our world it’s huge — that’s astounding,” said study co-author Alex Gardner, an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. Add in more water from melting in other ice sheets and glaciers, along with an ocean that expands as it warms, and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems, he said.

While general ice-melt records in Greenland go back to 1948, scientists began making more precise assessments in 2003 courtesy of NASA satellites that measure the gravity of the ice sheets. It’s the equivalent of putting the ice on a scale and weighing it as water flows off, Gardner said.

In 2017 and 2018, cooler Arctic air flowed from the open ocean into Greenland, which made the summers milder and the melt less severe, he said.

This year, Greenland’s summer melt has also been closer to normal for recent times, said Ruth Mottram, an ice scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute who was not involved in the new study.

Mottram and several other independent scientists said that Sasgen’s calculations made sense. In her own study this month in the International Journal of Climatology, she reported similar results and also calculated that since 1991, Greenland coastal regions have warmed by an average of about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.7 degrees Celsius) in the summer.

“The fact that 2019 set an all-time record is very concerning,” said New York University ice scientist David Holland, who wasn’t part of either study.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-20/greenland-record
-melt-lost-billions-tons-ice-2019

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Thursday, August 20, 2020 2:01 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

From ‘firenadoes’ to record heat, California extreme weather a glimpse of future

As one of the worst heat waves in years continues to broil California, millions are experiencing the havoc that ensues with extreme weather that is growing more frequent with climate change. Warmer nights in particular have the imprint of global warming, scientists say, and offer a glimpse into California’s future as greenhouse gas emissions gradually heat the planet.

“Climate change is certainly increasing the frequency, severity and duration of extreme heat and warm nights,” said Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It is safe to assume that climate change contributed to the extreme nature of recent events,” though only a dedicated study could attribute to what extent.

https://www.thedailyworld.com/northwest/from-firenadoes-to-record-heat
-california-extreme-weather-a-glimpse-of-future/

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Thursday, August 20, 2020 2:02 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Yes, climate change is almost certainly fueling California’s massive fires

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/20/1007478/california-wildfir
es-climate-change-heatwaves/

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Thursday, August 20, 2020 6:27 PM

Maybe we can fight the Coomph with forest fires.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 21, 2020 1:55 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You must be competing with Marcos/SECOND to post the stupidest things, JACKAREN, and trolling me from thread to thread.

GOOD!!

I love to watch you implode into futile, childish tantrums, the same way Marcos/SECOND is imploding.

I apologize to everyone for starting a thread to keep up with facts about SARS-COV-2, and driving JACKAREN over the edge with too much reality.

But I get endless fun out of watching it.

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Friday, August 21, 2020 7:29 AM

What, are you a narcissist now? Got nothing to do with you, hun.

And what's this imploding you speak of, or that dumb signature you keep posting about me?

You'll know when I'm over the edge. And you should feel quite safe knowing that there is nothing that you could ever say or do that would be the catalyst.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 21, 2020 7:43 AM

Because forest fires work far too slow and we've only added 3 deaths to The Coomph despite the fact that enough of California is currently burning down to make up half the real estate of Rhode Island, here's a better idea...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, August 21, 2020 5:01 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

I apologize to everyone for starting a thread to keep up with facts about SARS-COV-2, and driving JACKAREN over the edge with too much reality.

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Friday, August 21, 2020 5:27 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

And back to the OP ...

99.999% Certainty Humans Are Driving Global Warming: New Study

https://www.iflscience.com/environment/99999-certainty-humans-are-driv
ing-global-warming-new-study/

A probabilistic analysis of human influence on recent record global mean temperature changes

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096314000163?vi
a%3Dihub

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Friday, August 21, 2020 9:19 PM

Cool.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, August 22, 2020 2:43 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/weather/siberia-arctic-temperature-
wildfires-intl/index.html

Siberia had its warmest June ever as wildfires raged and carbon dioxide emissions surged

So the surge came from wildfires, not increased human activity.

This is an example of "positive feedback", where increased carbon dioxide causes wilfires which cause increased carbon dioxide.

Another major positive feedback is increasing greenhouse gases causes increased methane release (greenhouse gas) causing increased methane release.

As an aside, I was always under the impression - false, as it turns out-that carbon dioxide is cleared from the atmo much more quickly than methane. Methane is pretty unreactive, as far as atmo chemistry is concerned. It's such a spherical molecule it offers no point of attack, whereas carbon dioxide dissolves in water and is absorbed by plants.

But for some reason (which I have yet to look up) altho it is a potent greenhouse gas (32X stronger than CO2) the half-life of methane in the atmo is only 7 years, whereas the half life of CO2 is about 27 years.

One of the problems of relying on methane instead of oil and coal is that all of that methane-handling (extraction, pumping/pressurization, piping, fueling etc) causes LEAKS. It wouldn't be a problem except, as I mentioned, methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

At this point there is no way to reverse or even halt global climate shift. The best we can do is slow it down, and try to adapt to the changes ... and help the environment adapt, too.

One positive aspect is that rainfall is expected to INCREASE throughout much of the USA (except the extreme southwest, where I live) ... SIX, I think you have some experience with that ... so allowing trees to grow in former corn and soy fields would help soak up some of that CO2.

*****

As an aside, I listened to a very interesting commentary by a former Canadian regulator who was banging the alarm bell about GMOs and glyphosate. Apparently, in addition to killing weeds, glyphosate is used ... off-label ... to end grain growth cycle and dry it out (I think he called it "dessication") to artificially start the ripening process. The reason why this happens, he explained, was that those giant combines are million-dollar investments ... far beyond the reach of the average farmer ... and so the farmers subcontract the combine operators to do their harvesting for them. But these combine operators operate on a schedule ... this week, they're doing Custer County, NE; next week they're doing Dawson County.

So the fields have to be ready to be harvested, whether they're really ready or not. Hence, the artificial ripening.

I didn't know that.

So, just to continue off-topic for a bit, this is ONE of the reasons why I proposed smaller farms, smaller equipment (less capital-intensive), and less automation. Is it less "efficient" in that it requires more people-power? Yep, that's part of the plan! OTOH the farmer is more in control of the plowing/planting/reaping schedule, more responsive to the weather and natural ripening time,and able to plow/plant/harvest around those little swampy areas and ephemeral wetlands that (used to) support all kinds of wildlife.

I like to watch vet shows, especially large-animal vets. Not because I want to see a calf being pulled for the 100th time, but because I get to look at, and think about, the condition of farms and farmers in different states. One of the things I noticed, about Nebraska in particular, is that altho the land is fairly flat, it's not THAT flat. There is some contour to the land, but apparently contour plowing isn't practiced anymore. and it leads to nasty big gullies and all kinds of soil erosion. A farming practive that doesn't "bank" carbon into the soil, and yet another reason not to use big machines.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Monday, September 14, 2020 6:14 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Two major Antarctic glaciers are tearing loose from their restraints, scientists say

Two Antarctic glaciers that have long kept scientists awake at night are breaking free from the restraints that have hemmed them in, increasing the threat of large-scale sea-level rise.

Located along the coast of the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica, the enormous Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers already contribute around 5 percent of global sea-level rise. The survival of Thwaites has been deemed so critical that the United States and Britain have launched a targeted multimillion-dollar research mission to the glacier. The loss of the glacier could trigger the broader collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough ice to eventually raise seas by about 10 feet.

The new findings*, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from analysis of satellite images. They show that a naturally occurring buffer system that prevents the glaciers from flowing outward rapidly is breaking down, potentially unleashing far more ice into the sea in coming years.

The glaciers’ “shear margins,” where their floating ice shelves encounter high levels of friction that constrain the natural flow of ice, are progressively weakening and in some cases breaking into pieces.

Enormous curved crevasses near the Pine Island Glacier shear margin. (Brooke Medley/NASA)

“The stresses that slow down the glacier, they are no longer in place, so the glacier is speeding up,” said Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who led the new research along with colleagues from NASA and other research institutions in France, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.

While many of the images have been seen before, the new analysis suggests that they are a sign of further disintegration to come.

“We already knew that these were glaciers that might matter in the future, but these images to me indicate that these ice shelves are in a very bad state,” Lhermitte said.

It’s just the latest in a flurry of bad news about the planet’s ice.

Arctic sea ice is very close to — but likely to not quite reach — a record low for this time of year. Last month, Canada lost a large portion of its last major Arctic ice shelf.

And in Greenland, the largest still-intact ice shelf in the Northern Hemisphere, sometimes known as 79 North because of its latitude (its full name is Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden), just lost a large chunk of ice, equivalent in size to roughly two Manhattan islands, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Experts there blamed the fracture on a strong general warming trend and temperatures that have been “incredibly” high in the northeast of Greenland in recent years.

Ice shelves are vast floating platforms that extend across the surface of the ocean at the outer edge of marine-based glaciers. As they flow over the water, these shelves freeze onto mountainsides and islands and anchor themselves to bumps in the seafloor. In this way, the shelves provide a braking mechanism on the natural outward flow of ice.

The buttressing effect occurs in the shear margins, where faster-flowing ice meets ice that is more static and stable, often because it is moored to some part of the landscape. In these places, the ice frequently crumples and contorts, a visible indication of the powerful stresses that it is under.

The Pine Island Glacier's damaged shear margin. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

At the same time, and for the same reason, the glaciers themselves began to flow outward faster. The resulting forces led the shear-margin ice to break into pieces — which means that the glacier, less constrained, will now be able to add ice to the ocean even faster.

For the Pine Island Glacier, the new study finds that while the cracking and fraying at the shear margin dates to 1999, it accelerated in 2016. Here’s a video based on images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite, showing the changes in the past four years: (see original for video)

Even more concerning is the Thwaites Glacier. Here, again, the breakdown of the shear margin has increased in recent years: (see original for video)

“This is important work,” Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said of the new study.

Alley noted that the processes playing out in Antarctica appear to have already reached their completion in parts of Greenland, where one of the largest glaciers, Jakobshavn, no longer has any significant ice shelf at all. When it lost that shelf around the year 2000, Jakobshavn’s rate of ice loss steeply increased.

The 79 North glacier still has a major ice shelf, as do some of Greenland’s other northernmost glaciers, but many of these have lost considerable size in recent decades.

“The new paper shows that the Amundsen Sea Embayment ice shelves have gone through most, but not all, of the Jakobshavn steps,” Alley said in an email. “[A] warming ocean thinned the ice shelves, this reduced buttressing, this let the non-floating ice move faster, contributing some to sea-level rise and also starting to break the sides of the ice shelves, but additional acceleration could occur if the rest of the steps (further fracture and ice-shelf loss) should occur.”

Multiple ice-shelf collapses have already been seen in Canada, Greenland and the warmer Antarctic Peninsula, where the onetime Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves fractured and, today, no longer exist.

“When the ice shelves are damaged by climate change, as we saw in the Antarctic Peninsula in the last several decades, their buttressing effect is reduced and the ice streams speed up and raise sea levels,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine, commenting on the new study. “The speed-up increases damage, a positive feedback which is not good news.”

If a similar process plays out in the Amundsen Sea of West Antarctica, where Pine Island and Thwaites are, the sea-level consequences could be enormous.

Lhermitte provided calculations showing that over the past six years, the western and central parts of the Pine Island ice shelf have shrunk by about 30 percent, from about 1,500 square miles down to closer to 1,000 square miles. In other words, an area about the size of Los Angeles has been lost.

“This shear margin is so damaged we think it preconditions this ice shelf for destabilization on the longer term,” Lhermitte said. “These are the first signs we see that Pine Island ice shelf is disappearing. This damage is difficult to heal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers
-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/

* original paper link https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/08/1912890117

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Tuesday, September 15, 2020 4:49 PM

REAVERFAN

Li'l Benny gets owned.

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Wednesday, February 17, 2021 7:02 PM