Thursday, December 28, 2006

More Signs Of the Coming Enviro-Apocalypse, And On My Birthday, Too!

In the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005, with a force so powerful that seismic monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors, a 66 square kilometre chunk of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf broke away from the body of Ellesmere Island , and floated out into open waters. Scientists are only now getting a look at the event's aftermath. They blame the breakup on the onset of Global Warming:

"We're seeing incredible changes," said Warwick Vincent of Laval University, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene.

"People talk of endangered animals -- well, these are endangered landscape features, and we're losing them."

[...]

Mr. Ward and his team of researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of 30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.

The ice island is about 37 metres thick and measures roughly 15 kilometres by five kilometres. That's the size of a small city, or larger than 11,000 football fields. At the moment its stuck in winter ice, but may become a potential hazard to navigation and oil and gas extraction if it breaks loose and floats south towards the Beaufort Sea.

(August 13th was a Sunday, and I remember lying around my apartment eating birthday cake that afternoon when a voice whispered in my head: 'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, it said, and then: Doom, baby, doom! Weird, huh?)

Meanwhile, as the Climate Science community slowly gains the ear of mainstream politicians, there are deep and searching discussions going on re. the need (or lack thereof) to dial back the rhetoric on Climate Change. Are climate researchers "overselling" the science by concentrating on "worst case scenarios"; can a case be made for proselytizing/PR, or should these be abandoned for the plain-vanilla declarations of scientific discourse? H/T to Kate for linking to these documents (you see I still send you traffic even when you're mean to me), although I doubt she and her minions are capable of comprehending what they are reading in them.

IMHO, for environmentalists and scientists working for political action on Climate Change to entirely abandon Rhetoric would be to unilaterally disarm. Its not like Big Oil will suddenly fire all of its lobbyists and accept the truth without a fight.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nothing in any of this proves that global warming is a man made phenomenon. That's where the debate is try joining it.

bigcitylib said...

So that's your latest fall back position, is it? It's happening but its not anybody's fault?

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Whose fault were earth's several ice ages and subsequent inter glacial warm periods?

bigcitylib said...

Nobody's, because nobody was pumping C02 into the air. That's something that's changed.

Anonymous said...

So that's your latest fall back position, past climate changes were natural but this time is different.

bigcitylib said...

Quite so. This one is the first one which is anthropogenic.

Anonymous said...

And why would that rule out natural change as the prime driver?

bigcitylib said...

Because anthropogenic just means "man-made", and because most of the other possible natural drivers of the the warming (like Solar forcing, which seems to be the Deniers favorite "theory") have been considered at length and discarded.

Anonymous said...

So all of the possible natural drivers (most of which are unknown or misunderstood by current science) which have affected and altered earth's climate from the beginning of time are ruled out by BSL and a claque of government dependent scientists. All debate ceases and the new age of Kyoto driven social engineering dawns. Marxism by a new name.

Anonymous said...

So all of the possible natural drivers (most of which are unknown or misunderstood by current science)

Could you list those "unknown" ones for me?

No wonder no one takes the deniers seriously.

Anonymous said...

I'm thankful that Alberta is immune to Global Warming.

bigcitylib said...

Paul,

Alberta is not immune to drought.

bigcitylib said...

Deno wrote:

"According to tree rings data there was a 40 year drought in Alberta in the 1700's.

Was this drought 250 years ago caused by man made global warming?"

No. But the evidence says that this episode of global warming is man-made. Why is that so hard for you to grasp?