Arkane posted:

Assuming 2 inches per decade, do you think this is an insurmountable problem for Miami, or even a difficult one? Obvious answer is I think no...

down with slavery posted:

Because of what happens when the ocean takes in more heat.

down with slavery posted:

No, because I look at the climate change problem(and really- it's not just about climate but about our economic systems and ideologies) from a holistic perspective where surface air temperatures are not the only issue worth talking about.

Arkane posted:

IF the ocean will take in more heat than we anticipated and therefore climate sensitivity is far lower than what was first thought, the surface will warm less, and all of those doom scenarios can largely be thrown out of the window.

Renaissance Robot posted:

Not really, because all the fish will be dead.

Arkane posted:

I read a lot of climate stuff.

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

Consider the overwhelming scientific consensus and data showing the only true trend is that past IPCC estimates of warming and arctic ice loss have been greatly under-estimated countered, boys.

quote:

James Annan, another climate scientist, has written numerous takedowns of Pielke’s flawed analyses. “There’s obviously a simple conceptual misunderstanding underlying Roger’s attempts at analysis,” Annan observed. For example, Annan debunked a 2008 post by Pielke that called into question whether actual observed trends are consistent with the climate models employed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its projections. Pielke concludes that they are inconsistent, but Annan is quick to point out the lack of a foundation on which to base that claim. “I challenged this obvious absurdity and repeatedly asked him to back it up with a calculation,” Annan wrote. “After a lot of ducking and weaving, about the 30th comment under the post, he eventually admits ‘I honestly don’t know what the proper test is.’”

quote:

And in a rather comical error, Australian scientist Tim Lambert noted that a Pielke blog post claiming “there were 1,264 times as many news stories about a Michael Mann study that suggests that hurricanes are at a 1,000 year high as about a Chris Landsea study that found no increase in hurricanes over the past century” was based on a Google search that included results for a film director named Michael Mann. “Soon after I posted this, Pielke finally made a correction, allowing that being out by a couple of orders of magnitude was a ‘bit sloppy,’” Lambert wrote.

Arkane posted:

So...what happens?

I don't think you know what you are talking about. Even in spite of that scary graph you posted, the ocean temperature over the past 50 years has risen by .06C. The ocean's capacity for storing heat is magnitudes larger than the atmosphere. Showing atmospheric warming and ocean warming on a graph next each other only serves to mislead. If that graph was expressed in degrees C rather than joules, it would be little different than a straight line.

IF the ocean will take in more heat than we anticipated and therefore climate sensitivity is far lower than what was first thought, the surface will warm less, and all of those doom scenarios can largely be thrown out of the window.


There's a shocker.

The citation Arkane did not read carefully posted:

This is consistent with the comparison by Roemmich and Gilson (2009) of Argo data with the global temperature time-series of Levitus et al (2005), finding a warming of the 0 - 2000 m ocean by 0.06°C since the (pre-XBT) early 1960's.

down with slavery posted:

TACD posted:

Mauna Loa Observatory is reading CO₂ at 400ppm again - almost two months earlier than last year. Good job everyone!

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_25397460/boulder-scientists-report-record-early-high-co2-readings

sadus posted:

Does turning the ocean into a soup of plastic and trash count as climate change? http://m.vice.com/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

sadus posted:

Does turning the ocean into a soup of plastic and trash count as climate change? http://m.vice.com/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

quote:

The problem with all the bravado on both sides of the ecology debate is that nobody really knows what they’re talking about.

TACD posted:

The Pacific trash vortex is frightening and this is an good article to forward to non-sciencey friends, but I don't care for his attempt to frame himself as some sort of neutral party 'above' the debate with this sort of poo poo

quote:

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.

"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.

Not this time.

"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.

"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.

"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.

"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."

Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.

And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.

"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.

He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.

More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.

Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.

"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.

"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

TACD posted:

The Pacific trash vortex is frightening and this is an good article to forward to non-sciencey friends, but I don't care for his attempt to frame himself as some sort of neutral party 'above' the debate with this sort of poo poo:
Acting as if we can only know what we have personally witnessed is the same stupid tactic Creationists use, and it's not helpful to the perception of science.

Rhjamiz posted:

The more I read and hear about the growing issue of what is, essentially, the complete destruction of our oceans and the absolutely zero amount of gently caress given by any government in a position to do anything about it, the less I feel like there is any going back. Being alive to witness the slow and agonizing death of the marine ecosystem wasn't the major milestone I was looking forward to. I was hoping it was going to be the colonization of Mars.

Does DnD have a "Good News Only" feel-good thread? Because goddamn if it doesn't desperately need one.

Arkane posted:

Yeah, I agree with Bjorn Lomborg virtually 100% in principle on climate policies as they relate the developing world.

Cingulate posted:

Couldn't find this on the last few pages. Not sure if this belongs here or rather in the "pseudoscience" thread.

TACD posted:

Yea, this is an upsetting mix of climate denialists unable to refute science highlighting how crazy they are using another creationist tactic and trying to shut down scientific output they don't like, and a miserable cowardly journal that would rather censor itself and set a damaging precedent than let these wackos publically humiliate themselves in a court of law.

"Climate change is a real and present danger and we must stop at nothing to stop it, unless that means attracting any sort of attention whatsoever, oh please don't hurt me "

Paper Mac posted:

If the issue was just that they named names, they can presumably resubmit with individuals' names removed (which they probably should have done in the first place).

Cingulate posted:

I don't quite understand why Frontiers gave in to this. They just got more or less bought by Nature, surely Nature can afford a lawyer.

bpower posted:

Climate denialism is one thing but this claim of concern for the global poor is just too much. Right wing economic ideology ,call it libertarian or whatever you want, is difficult to live with if you accept the scientific consensus. Thats the real reason some people are so bitterly opposed to the idea.

quote:

Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said the report was based on more than 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. He said this document was "the most solid evidence you can get in any scientific discipline".

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

I mean really, can you image how much of an Ass such a person would be? A complete prehistoric reactionary, loving kook, an absolute nonsensical, walking talking pile of human effluence.

Speedball posted:

Let's suppose for a moment that people get good and scared enough to get off their assess and effect major change. This past year with its polar vortex and horrible flooding, for example. Best-case scenario it for me, can we unfuck this world? Assume the next world leaders' big project is getting everyone to get electric cars and solar generators or something.

Arkane posted:

is that if you convert the OHC from joules to degrees celsius, it represents a temperature increase in the oceans of .06C. So one can easily be misled that this amount of heat is warming the oceans dangerously when that is not the case.