A world without polar ice caps
 

This is quite surreal.

I expected this to happen but not in my lifetime - or not until I was very old. But to think they now estimate it could happen within a matter of a few years? Bizarre.

Obviously this will have global repercussions. I've heard some theories - some say this will trigger a new ice age and others are expecting the middle of the US becoming the new Death Valley.

It's weird to think about. This is it yeah? I guess we are entering a new era of man on this planet. Not tomorrow, but right now.

I always find it hard that the Met Office can't even tell us what the weather is going to be in 24 hours time let alone 24 weeks, months or years.

I give it a 50-50 chance: either they're right or ...

Environment Canada seems to do a pretty god job.

The Ireland weather service doesn't happen to be next to the Guinness factory does it?

They's not that heavenly, but better than the weather network. Their 14-day forecast is a joke.

I understood that a problem with weather forecasting in the UK is that the diminutive size of the place makes it hard to get the timing right. The weather she comes, the weather she goes, but get the timing wrong and you get rain on your picnic when the forecast said "sun".

Not that far away as it happens.

I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out. And I think the worst thing we could do is to overreact and start pointing fingers. Climate change is cyclical and we happen to be in (or entering into) a warming phase.

Man made or not, we are entering this phase right now.

I believe there is no doubt we will see the ice caps vanish in our lifetime. No human has ever recorded this event. Now, we don't know if this will be recorded 3000+ years from now as the last extinction-level event, the great Heat Age, or what... but we get to see the opening act.

That's pretty cool, a touch scary, and kind of sad when you think of it - mostly because a lot of animals are going to die off from this.

I know it's kind of ridiculous, but the fact that the current generation of polar bears is essentially the last makes me inordinately sad. :(

This may sound callous but animal species have been dying off since the world began. What we, as the most advanced specie of animal on the planet can do, is to not facilitate their demise.

I know. It's weird. We know about it, we know what is going to happen and there is nothing we can do right now to stop it.

Fortunately the USA has tons of barely defended land for the taking right on it's northern border.

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Humans are not the best caretakers. Profit will always win out over the continuation of a species.

Which I also think will result in the end of the humans as well.

The key to survival is adaptation. Life survived on earth following the demise of the dinosaurs because certain species adapted. I hope somehow that polar bears and penguins can adapt to meet a changing environment.]

And humans, too.

The difference here is the time frame. This is going to happen rather quickly in the big scheme of things. I don't have a lot of faith polar bears will adapt within a few generations. If we were talking a slow decay - like over 100 years - with slowly receding ice caps, then maybe.

I think the only way polar bears will survive this is with human intervention. Begin a breeding program and maintain the species until such time they can be reintroduced.

Who knows? They may do just fine slopping around the land eating mice and rats and whatever else adapts to the land after the white goes away.

This is anecdotal until I find the source again, but I remember reading that species can handle an increase in temperatures more easily than an equivalent decrease. The warmer periods of Earth's history have also had higher biodiversity. This warming trend is also pretty low in scale, comparatively. Will some species still die out? Almost certainly. Polar bears might even be one of the unlucky ones.

Here's a question: will we let species adapt? The article mentions encroachment of invasive species as one of the results of climate shift. "Invasive species" is a term with negative connotations, and we tend to want to reverse such instances when possible. When it's our fault they invaded, sure, good idea to correct it. But when they're moving to keep up with a changing climate, that's hardly invasion. That's migration. If we continue our stance of preventing the spread of what we see as invasive species, we can end up preventing adaptation.

And of course, we also have to think about how we're going adapt. Adjusting the thermostat probably won't cut it. Will sea levels be affected (and if so, what should/could be done about coastal cities)? What about agriculture? Climate change can potentially hit that very hard, and we need to be prepared.

Going green, reducing emissions, and all that is a good thing. But it's not going to stop the change already occurring, nor is it going to reverse anything any time soon (if it's even reversible to begin with).

Goldurn it, Frankenstein, I was going to open this thread in the Longneck Library later tonight, when I had all my ducks in a row. That's right, steal my bleepin' thread!

Just finished a "there, there" book on climate change that was so shallow, I followed it with a more in-depth, science-based thesis. The book is Fred Pearce's With Speed and Violence, and he leaves little doubt about the outcome of changes we're observing now and how quickly we can expect them. I'm not even halfway through it and I'm already convinced that this guy, and the others he cites, have got it right.

The matter of climate change is an incredibly complex web of interrelationships that take into account the breakoff of ice shelves in Antarctica, the shrinking of Greenland's glacier, the carbon sink of temperate forests, the thawing of the permafrost, repeated drought that is beginning to turn the entire Amazon rain forest into savannah, fires in Indonesia that are consuming huge, ancient peat bogs, and the warming of massive deposits of frozen peat in Siberia that are beginning to release methane.

And of course there's more...and more...to come. He is talking credibly about rising sea levels, not in feet but in yards; some islands, like Tuvalu, have already disappeared under water and others in the South Pacific are being evacuated. He points to evidence that we are approaching a tipping point beyond which global warming will become unstoppable. I figure I've got maybe 15 years left so I may not see it, but you younger folks will—as will my children and grandchildren. They will likely be too busy insuring food security and fighting tropical diseases to worry about who owns the shipping lanes in the Arctic. Scary business.

On edit, @ Dirx & Victor, who snuck in ahead of me: I predict we will be far too concerned with saving our own skin in the battle with floods, drought, fire, disease, and hurricanes to worry about saving any species except our own.

That if the interior of the USA becomes a desert, we won't necessarily starve.

Oh, it gets better.

As long as we're talking about doomsday scenarios, more than 1700 tiny earthquakes have rattled Yellowstone National Park since January 17, the second largest cluster of such rumblings ever recorded there. Ranging from magnitude .5 to 3.1, they are concentrated about ten miles north of Old Faithful. That seismically active region sits atop the caldera of a "supervolcano" that last erupted 640,000 years ago. If it exploded again, it would kill people for hundreds of miles around and cover most of the U.S. with ash. Particulate matter in the atmosphere might halt your global warming right there. But relax—geophysicists don't think such an event is likely any time soon.

Wait. Isn't that what they said about climate change?

In Superfreakonomics, the authors talk about solving/mitigating climate change in different ways from the "standard" approach of cutting carbon emissions. One of the examples they give is the deliberate introduction of particulate matter into the atmosphere to reduce the amount of light that makes it through, just like a Yellowstone super eruption would. I don't have the book with me right now but I think it was Sulphur dioxide, or similar. The cooling from this would offset warming from carbon dioxide, and buy us more time to work out a prevention (rather than cure) - whether the problem is man-made or not.

The problem with that model is it is liable to lead us to a new Ice Age which would be definitely man-made.

Well, it's all about controlling it. Even substantial volcanic eruptions (which provided the inspiration) produce a noticeable cooling effect without starting ice ages. Levels can be monitored and adjusted accordingly - and the particles dissipate reasonably quickly.

But basic chaos theory predicts that the one thing that's not monitored will be the kicker.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything until we're actively monitoring everything in existence.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. However, what it does imply is that we don't fully understand the full set of issues that are causing the current warming trend. And that we don't understand the full set of results that would come from us enacting a change, any change.

So no, we shouldn't do nothing. We should try to make changes that, according to estimates, look like they will make positive changes. We should just understand that we don't really know whether it will do that, or even how necessary they would be.

It's difficult to get the balance, and easy with hindsight to say "of course using CFCs which we thought were stable was actually a bad idea because they break down in the upper atmosphere and deplete ozone". Things can have unintended consequences. But as long as we don't go into it blindly I think there's a lot to be gained from fighting the symptoms of climate change as well as the causes.

The particulates in the atmosphere idea is just one, which is based on naturally occuring phenomena which have happened recently and the full impact of which can be (reasonably) well appreciated before the fact. There are a couple of other ideas which work differently (helping circulate seawater to lower the temperature at the surface), the effects of which are hard to predict beforehand because we've not really got anything to compare it with.

But the benefit of actively pursuing "global cooling" activities is that since their only reason for existence is to cool the planet, if they don't work or have unintended consequences, we can simply stop doing them. Our activities that are greenhouse gas producing can't simply be stopped, because the greenhouse gas is a by-product of those activities and their main product is still required. If we were to replace all oil-fuelled cars by electric vehicles we would reduce carbon footprint (if the electricity came from a non-carbon source) - but if we found in 10 years that disposing of the batteries was causing a worse environmentally disaster than the oil, we can't simply stop because, of course, we still need to power our vehicles. The flipside of this argument is, obviously, that an activity whose primary function is to cool the planet has very little direct economic benefit - so the business model supporting such an activity is less tenable.

I am (poorly) reminded of the bizarre Earth-shield from Highlander II, which was built by McLeod to prevent global warming or ozone depletion or some such bollocks. Decades later it turns out that it is causing a new problem, for some probably non-sensical reason. Still, after it was destroyed, the Earth was lovely and wonderful and the original problem was no longer around. Maybe it's time we put up our temporary shield to buy us some time while we fix the original problem.

Sorry, that ended up very rambling. I wrote it in several steps and now I'm not sure it makes sense, but I've spent a lot of time on it so here goes....

I can forgive the rambling point of the Highlander Theory, and thank you for contributing (I'm not the OP, I just play one from time to time ;)). As human caretakers of this tiny planet we have a responsibility to maintain standards of living as much as we can. Things such as global events/natural disasters may be beyond our control but on a personal level we can limit our participation in the destruction of species and degradation of natural resources. We can stop polluting the air and water of our planet. Embrace cleaner (green) technologies. Maybe buy an Audi...

Seeding particulate matter into the atmosphere is potentially a very bad idea. To expand on Blank's comment: let's say we go ahead and do it. Then a week later, Yellowstone explodes. There's a sudden and rather sharp decrease in temperature. You say we shouldn't muck around with that stuff until we understand all the variables completely, which is true. But it will be a very long time indeed before we can have even the remotest grasp of the full set of variables. We're talking about a global scale, here.

Mitigating and eliminating any harm we may be causing is priority one. Plans to actively control the global climate is something to keep on the backburner in case things get really hairy and our mitigation efforts don't have any appreciable effect. I'd also argue that we probably shouldn't attempt it at all if it's determined that the warming trend turns out to be 100% natural. Cleaning up our mess is one thing; playing god with an entire planet is something that needs a lot of special consideration first.

I'm thinking it's time to invest in Nunavut coastal real estate. Not the current coast, of course, but a few miles inland.

Yep, I'm pretty much in complete agreement with Dirx. When I said we should make changes above, I'm referring to changes in our behavior and environmental impact. I'm not talking about intrusive changes on the state of the current environment. Before we toss water on the flames, we should make sure we're not dealing with a grease fire. When we don't even know what a grease fire is, really.

I was just watching a show about a fellow who is trying to develop an industrial-scale carbon scrubber, to be able to pull out atmospheric carbon as it's put out. The scrubber itself was successful, able to scrub out more carbon than was put in by powering the device. So on that front, great. The next problem is, what do you do with the carbon? They were considering freezing it into large rings, loading the rings onto sleek torpedoes, and firing them into the seabed. This is around when they lost me. As they noted, whatever method they use to bury the carbon, if they get a leak into the water/air (as carbon dioxide/monoxide), they could kill whatever was in the gas stream.

Simple math tells us that melting polar caps will equal rising sea levels, but let's not discount the ability of earthquakes to raise land as well. We know from history that North America was underwater from the east of the Rockies to the Appalachians.

I'm a little out of my element, but as I understood it, melting sea ice shouldn't affect sea levels too appreciably. It's the continental ice sheets that, when melting and returning to the sea, will cause some problems.

As for continents rising in and out of the sea... There's eustatic sea level change (the change is global, and what we'll see from the above scenario), and there's local/relative change. Both are responsible for the numerous instances of continental seas in Earth's history. For the latter to take effect (be it pushing us up out of the sea, or submerging us further), it would require a massive tectonic event, on the scale of colliding continents. That's something we can say, with some certainty, won't be happening for a very long time.

I think we're screwed as long as everything we come up with just produces more waste to get rid of somehow. We need some genius-type to come along and figure out how to use solar energy to make carbon and oxygen out of all the CO2. Then another genius to figure out how to use the carbon to make carbon-fiber car bodies and carbon nanotube space elevators. And one more to make transparent aluminum or something with the oxygen. Yep, then we'll be ok.

You've been watching Star Trek IV again.

Holy crap. That's impressive as hell.

When we attempt to arrest or reverse carbon emissions, we're essentially talking about a fart in a windstorm, given the level of geological events happening as we speak...e.g. so much methane bubbling up out of Siberian peat bogs at this moment that it keeps them from freezing in winter. Yes, in Siberia.

And when we envision some sort of particulate emission that will reflect sunlight back and initiate cooling, it sounds like the Unalterable Law of Unintended Consequences. Remember the year without a summer, Eighteen Hundred and Froze-to-Death? In 1816, as a result of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, there was not a single month in the U.S. without a killing frost. Think what that did to crops. And the massive scale of such an outcome today.

:: shudder ::