
Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start - pmcpinto
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/07/antarctica-sea-level-rise-climate-change/
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vocatus_gate
I just came back from 7 months on one of the U.S. research stations, doing
network engineering and glacier search and rescue. It was pretty interesting
to see how fast the glacier face the station was near was retreating each
year.

edit: did an AMA while there that hit the reddit front page

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_ha...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5656e1/iama_i_dont_have_a_lot_of_time_but_network/)

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nonbel
I've found the coverage of this Larsen C rift to be disquieting since I read
that the people studying it don't link the event to climate change:

>"The team say they have no evidence to link the growth of this rift, and the
eventual calving, to climate change."
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170602112819.htm)

It seems that everyone in the media or commenting on the internet suddenly
knows better than the experts on this topic.

~~~
wavefunction
All they said was that they don't have evidence for a link, which may be
because there is no link, there is a link but they haven't found the evidence
yet, or a link was never within the scope of their study.

You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the
"don't link the event to climate change."

~~~
nonbel
>'You're basically claiming they found evidence disproving a link with the
"don't link the event to climate change."'

No I am not. But by default I would assume all such events (really every event
on earth) are somehow linked to climate change... it is exceptional to me that
they claim to have no evidence for this.

Edit: Isn't it interesting that everyone except them (who are the apparent
experts here) seems to have no problem linking it with climate change,
including me?

~~~
DennisP
This comes up a lot in climate discussions. There's a record hurricane or heat
wave, but these things happen randomly so there's no way to say definitively
that one particular event would not have happened without climate change.

But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes and
hotter heat waves.

In the same way, we know smoking causes lung cancer, but if you're a smoker
who gets lung cancer, nobody can say for sure that the smoking caused it,
because some nonsmokers get lung cancer too. They just don't get it as often.

~~~
jfnixon
"But we do know that overall, climate change causes stronger hurricanes" How
do we know this? I can find all sorts of papers predicting stronger
hurricanes, but just like the predictions of more numerous hurricanes, there
seems to be little observational evidence of the effect.

Here's the measured Accumulated Cyclone Energy, worldwide, 1970-2016. The
total energy seems to peak in the mid 1990s. Is this consistent with claims of
stronger hurricanes and more destructive hurricane seasons?

[https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_e...](https://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_energy.asp?basin=gl)

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celestialcheese
Wow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the
sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and
research in the last couple years are good for non-scientists about the
effects of rising oceans on socio-economics and politics?

~~~
Consultant32452
It will be hard to find anything that isn't exceedingly one-sided if socio-
economics and politics are involved. One thing to remember when you read that
stuff is that the poorest are the ones that suffer the most from the
regulations we put in place. For example, I support taxation on any product or
service with externalities where it's nearly impossible to price the damage
done into the product naturally. Pollution is a perfect example of this. I buy
oil from you, but third parties are harmed. Therefore somehow I need to pay a
tax and compensate everyone I'm harming. Anyways... who do you think this tax
will harm the most? The billionaire oil barons? Of course not. They will still
be billionaires. It's the poorest who need cheap fuel so they don't freeze to
death in the winter.

If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who
will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are
still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get _up_ to
the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every
day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear
to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning
coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks
about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses
perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization
and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that
today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the
socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution
can't be worse than the problem for poor people.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Distributing the revenue from said taxes back as a public dividend should
solve that problem nicely. Since we're all impacted by those externalities a
public dividend is only fair. And since the distributed money compensate for
increased costs the tax can be pretty high, and thus effective in directing
money towards alternate solutions.

~~~
duncan_bayne
... which makes the case that proponents of such taxes are at least partially
motivated by anti-capitalism and socialism.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
I'm against capitalism, so that would be a fair assessment of me. But if you
really want a label, try geo-libertarian, I'm definitely not a socialist.

In any case, even hard core capitalists would recognize the value in
controlling extenalities to help the market economy do its things.

If it helps I'm not a proponent of taxes per se. The tax I'm advocating could
just as easily be described as rent. It is my hope that a fair, and effective,
rent extraction from our shared capital (land, pollution rights, spectrum
bands and so forth) could actually help abolish unfair and damaging taxes like
income taxes.

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theprop
Yes, it is melting and some of the before/after photographs are the most
devastating evidence.

There are some famous photos of Patagonia 100 years ago and today...anyone
remember them?

I managed to find these before/after photos of glaciers in Alaska.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Globa...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2972130/Global-
warming-s-effects-glaciers-revealed-Amazing-shots-disappearing-ice-
past-125-years.html)

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Pulcinella
The greed of those already dead will kill us all.

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Tomminn
Some perspective from someone who is definitely concerned about climate
change: antarctica as a whole is losing 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year
[1] of its 30,000,000 cubic kilometers[2]. So at current burn rates it will be
another 300,000 years before antarctica has melted. Short of radical
acceleration, we aren't losing antarctica any time soon.

[1][https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antar...](https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarctica_Melting.html)

[2][https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/antarctic_ice_sheet.htm)

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rhino369
We should start angling for the contracts to build the seawalls that big
cities are going to need over the next 50 years.

~~~
lostlogin
And there's way more to it than that. Waste water will have to be pumped out
of storm water systems rather than flowing. Salt enters ground water and
causes changes. Things like underground car parks become problematic. Rivers
don't flow the same and may need gates to keep high tides and storm surges
out. The flow changes cause silting and river travel can be affected. Storm
surges should be handled by your wall, but they are terrifying for low lying
areas.

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girmad
Could ice shelves breaking off accelerate the rate with which methane
hydrocarbons are launched into the atmoshpere?

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trophycase
The real problem here is businesses who are causing this are externalizing
their costs to everyone else. So I have to buy an expensive EV, I have to
willingly pay more for energy, I must willingly inconvenience myself to bring
a reusable bag to the grocery store. Until we make those who are causing this
pay the real costs, we will never see any meaningful change. The worst part is
also that those countries that choose not to have any restrictions will
inevitably move ahead, economically, of those that do and slowly weaken those
that do have restrictions. The only real solution to this problem is complete
collapse or ubiquitous market forces that make the environmental choice also
the best fiscal choice.

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merpnderp
How is it even possible to talk about recent acceleration in melting without
mentioning the abnormally large el Nino we just had? Because it would imply
the acceleration was temporary.

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mkagenius
This topic is an open ended debate. How will we reach to a conclusion?
Certainly more research is a way..

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theprop
Launch many satellites into space which have huge reflective screens to bounce
away some 1% of the light that would otherwise reach Earth.

I heard this idea suggested at least a decade ago in Popular Science. I
imagine there are many such proposals to defeat global warming (beyond cutting
CO2 emissions), but somehow this one stuck with me. Musk could also do it with
his rockets.

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Dylan16807
So is billions of dollars enough to dam these channels and bottleneck the
melt?

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surferbayarea
US leads the world in per capita emissions. And people on the coasts(ny/sf)
are the worst offenders. Guess who will history hold responsible.

~~~
jhpriestley
California and New York have the lowest per capita CO2 emissions except for DC
according to
[https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/](https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/)

Wyoming, North Dakota have the most.

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microwavecamera
Well lucky for us global warming is a Chinese hoax. Nothing to see here, move
along citizen.

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tmpdude01
In 2014 Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum:

[https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-
reach...](https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-
record-maximum)

But now in 2017 we're talking about continent-wide collapse?

~~~
wcoenen
The way I understood it, the article is about glaciers and ice shelves, not
about antarctic sea ice extent which is largely driven by wind patterns. The
more northward winds, the more sea ice.

Incidentally, antarctic sea ice extent did go from record highs 3 years ago to
record lows this year.

[http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/antarctica-sea-
ice-r...](http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/16/world/antarctica-sea-ice-record-
low/index.html)

~~~
jtbayly
Second paragraph from the 2015 study linked above makes clear it is talking
about land, not sea ice:

"The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says
that Antarctica is overall losing land ice."

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jstanley
How many times have we heard this story before?

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nothrabannosir
Amusingly, this comment could be taken as an argument both for and against
this story.

