The Return of the Northwest Passage
Posted by
Kevin
The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced.
Experts say they are “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.
So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia’s Arctic coast could open later this month.
If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.
But global warming is a myth that will have no effect on our lives and we should just all ignore it anyway because it costs to much to fix and the damn dirty hippies want to take my Hummer away and force me to drive a horse drawn wagon in the snow, up hill, both ways while the use hysteria about the non-existent global warming that’s melting the Arctic much faster than predicted to establish their One world Socialist government with its Global Warming Collective farms and mandatory dirt hut residences and Hillary Clinton as King and Al Gore as Pope.
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Pingback 9/5/2007
No one says global warming is a myth. The skepticism comes when the idea that man is primarily responsible is pushed. Everyone agrees that global warming is occuring but to my knowledge the disagreement is over what all the causes are.
As an aside, think of the money that could be made by being able to ship year round through the northwest passage. What an economic boom for northern Canada.
Comment 9/5/2007
“No one says global warming is a myth.”
Au contraire, mon amie. And a few years ago there were plenty of people that denied global warming. The main resistance has shifted to disputing the cause, but not universally. And in a few more years, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the resistance will shift to disputing the best way to reverse the trend.
Comment 9/5/2007
What Ted said.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter what the cause is. In fact, the idea of “a cause” in this situation is ridiculous; the situation is complex and there are many contributing factors, so it’s futile to try and identify which of them is “the cause”. (This is a well-known problem with the concept of causation in multifactorial phenomena, which has received vast amounts of attention beginning with Aristotle. To see this simple fallacy played out at such high levels in the climate-change debate is disheartening. The conservatives use it as an obfuscating tactic, but even the honest players shot themselves in the foot by not being more clear from the beginning.)
The real problem is that there is a problem. Even if you could prove that human effects were not “the cause” of climate change, we ought to do something to stabilize it if we can. The fact that human effects almost undoubtedly are the proximate cause (”the straw that broke the camel’s back”) makes it likely that we can do something about it, making it the more necessary to do so. And claiming that some other contributing factor, like methane from rotting forest matter, is larger than a similar human factor is not evidence that the human contribution is not the proximate cause - it may take only a small disruption to destabilize a previously balanced system. So arguing over whether human action “caused” this phenomenon is not to the point - not only are the arguments ill-conceived, but the outcome has no effect on what our course of action must be, either way.
Comment 9/6/2007
Just out of curiosity, any idea how much sea levels have risen with this significant drop in ice levels? Surely a drop of 20% in two years and close to 40% in the past seven would have resulted in significantly increased water levels. I’ve looked but been unable to locate any such data. All I have seen is that the increase is minimal per year and within the average for the past several years.
Comment 9/6/2007
KTK,
Excellent point, wrt proximate cause and system stability. While I think most of us (at least those of us who know anything about climate change) understood this, it is rarely articulated so clearly.
I’ll keep it in mind when wackjobs claim that we shouldn’t fix the problem?
(By the way, if the major problem causing warming is net albedo change, why aren’t we just gene-engineering white algae? Way cheaper and easier than switching to alternative fuels.)
Comment 9/6/2007
Just out of curiosity, any idea how much sea levels have risen with this significant drop in ice levels? Surely a drop of 20% in two years and close to 40% in the past seven would have resulted in significantly increased water levels.
This is Arctic ice, from near the North Pole. It is all floating sea ice, so the melting does not change ocean levels. (As floating ice, it displaces water equal to its own weight - just like any floating object - but when it melts, it occupies a volume exactly equal to the volume of water it displaced, since liquid ice just is water. So there’s no net change in volume displaced. [Technically, there’s a difference in density between fresh water and salt water, but that’s negligible.])
It is the melting of the Antarctic ice cap - mostly found over dry land at the South Pole - that will change ocean levels. That melting has already begun.
Comment 9/6/2007
if the major problem causing warming is net albedo change, why aren’t we just gene-engineering white algae?
Sounds like Frank Herbert meets Edward
AlbeeAbbey [oops! - got confused while reading Who’s Afraid of the Canadian Timber Wolf?].Something like this has been tried, by the way. Not to change albedo, but to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Most carbon absorption takes place in the oceans, not the forests - the oceans are just so much bigger. If you can increase the metabolic activity of the top layer of ocean water, you can get all those little algae sucking up huge amounts of carbon. When, inevitably, they exhaust the oxygen or food supply in the water, they die off and either sink to the bottom or get eaten by other organisms. The carbon gets sequestered in the food chain - temporarily - or the sea-bottom sediment. But how to make this happen? Apparently, the limiting factor in algae growth in much of the ocean is not food or oxygen availability, but the concentration of iron-containing compounds involved in energy reactions in the algea. Add more iron, and the algae explode, causing a measurable, and quite significant, drop in CO2 in the atmosphere above that part of the ocean (having gotten dissolved into the water to replace the CO2 the algae metabolized). It’s been tried, and works remarkably at the demonstration level.
There are problems with this, however. You’re messing with the ecosystem at a huge scale - something that the climate change crisis itself should have taught us should be approached with extreme caution. The process involves changing the balance of organisms in an important part of the global ecosystem, as well as shifting the balances in several major chemical cycles. It also creates local die-offs - essentially a huge local red tide - over large parts of the ocean, affecting the other species that live there and feed off the surface fauna. Nobody knows how to manage that; even if they say they will only bump up the algae to historical levels, it’s not clear that’s safe or easy to control. And all this from merely increasing the normal growth of existing organisms. When you talk about adding in an unknown, genetically-engineered organism and changing the basic physical characteristics of the planet itself, it makes the debate over genetically-modified corn look like a joke. It’s also not clear you could grow enough soft, lab-grown, pasty white algae to make a big difference, since they’d be competing in a mature ecosystem that’s already got its own microfauna who are ready and willing to defend their turf against pale-skinned interlopers; there’s no reason to expect your new algae would become dominant in the ecosystem, and if they were engineered to be hypercompetitive, you’re then introducing huge risks to ecological stability.
Comment 9/6/2007
Okay, so maybe another dumb question, but if the ice in the Arctic melts, does that not create a large amount of ocean to work as a Carbon sink, thus helping the CO2 problem?
And from what I have seen, the western part of Antarctica is dropping in size but the eastern and central parts are getting thicker.
Count me confused.
Comment 9/6/2007
I am amazed how hard some folks try to convince themselves the earth’s climate is not changing, and/or the change is not impacting the earth.
As for using algae to fix the problem, living on the Chesapeake Bay and seeing the effects of algae blooms on all other life in the Bay, that solution is about as short-sighted as using ice-nine to stop the polar ice melt…
Comment 9/6/2007
if the ice in the Arctic melts, does that not create a large amount of ocean to work as a Carbon sink, thus helping the CO2 problem?
Good point. The oceanic carbon cycle is very complex, but, given that the water in polar ice represents a considerable fraction of the total volume of water in the oceans (hence the danger of sea-level rising if the Antarctic ice melts), and assuming there’s essentially no CO2 in it in the ice phase, presumably that would provide a large volume of sink material when it melts. And apparently there’s some evidence to that effect.
As for the Antarctic ice, there are different phenomena taking place at different spots on the continent, but the net effect is a large loss of ice mass:
Comment 9/6/2007
Actually, people still do claim that global warming is liberal propoganda - you’ll love “The Heritage Foundation”’s take
http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/globalwarming.cfm
I love the conclusion: “should we really risk the global economy just to keep the planet a little bit colder 40 years from now?”
Let’s face it, any person with the intelligence of a baboon believes that the planet’s fate is nearly sealed - but the corporations and the top .5% of the population that runs them (and our politicians) want to die with the comfort of $100 bills clutched in their fists - if only we can dupe the people long enough to make more money…
Comment 9/8/2007