The story and the scientist behind the remarkable video is here.
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All I can say is that looks totally dangerous – like Stallone in Cliffhanger.
“Must sea”?
Hey David! Don’t pick on JoeR, don’t you know he TAPES these blogs!? Blame the voice recognition for the spelling mistake and anyway, I kind of like it.
Once, I was in Italy with a group of Italian ladies who couldn’t pronounce my name. One of them asked my Italian/American friend, what does it mean?
After thinking a minute she said, “A wild tempest in the sea”.
I was going to correct her but they all looked at me with a sort of awe so I didn’t.
Joe Romm — In “John Tierney makes up stuff, just like George Will — does the New York Times also employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers?” I have a comment which has been “in moderation” for two days now.
[JR: Sorry, I miss some when I get so many comments.]
Curse you voice dictation system!
I love it when I can blame the computer.
Amazing. Glaciers melt in the summer.
That film is perhaps the most ridiculous piece of hype I have ever seen. Really, does this pass as science here?
I love this from the article: “Dr Box, from Ohio State University, thinks the way to combat melting glaciers is to cover them with blankets that will reflect the sun’s rays.”
Yeah. Okay. Good luck with that.
The rate of melt per yr is equivalent to covering Germany in a meter of water!
Gail — Wasn’t blaiming, just pointing out the typo (dictato(?)).
Joe — Now, now. Temper, temper.
yeah well, blaiming isn’t blaming exactly.
That’s okay. In days gone by, I was a newspaper columnist. I could spot a typo viscerally.
Now I don’t know if it’s my fingers or my eyes, but they hurtle out of my missives.
Well, actually it’s age.
I do, however, have an African Grey parrot trained to say, with a tender inflection, Obama! Yes we can!
Maybe this question has been asked 1,000 times, but has anyone done the math regarding how much heat this melting is absorbing? Could it be slowing the land-sea temperature rise as the almost freezing melt water and calved icebergs mix with the warmer ocean water? What happens when the ice is gone and there is nothing to moderate the forcing?
If its this bad at 385 ppm, we’ll be toast at 450, and the 600+ scenario will occur after sea level rise, methane feedbacks and our extinction. Geoengineering might be necessary.
Bob W, I wish I was organized enough to send you the link, but I did read somewhere about this issue. It was a post something like, if you heat a glass of water with ice cubes in it, the temperature of the water will stay the same until the cubes are melted.
Then, the water starts really heating up.
I have exactly no knowledge of the science involved but it sure gave me pause.
Bob: I’ve wondered that, too. With all this new melting at both poles, I have to wonder if we’re seeing a shifting of heat–it’s not quite as warm away from the poles, simply because so much heat is being sucked into melting all those billions of tons of ice.
This is gorgeous footage. But Ray is correct it is just that gorgeous footage. I spend alot of time measuring flow on a glacier surface often nearly a moulin, and to get an accurate reading you would not use a flow meter as they have. You would also not measure right next to the moulin. You need to assess the width and depth of the stream and the velocity. This requires a stream stretch with consistent characteristics, which you would find a short distance upstream of the moulin. Acoustic doppler or dye would give a much better reading of flow. The measurements of the stream volume are important, and I am guessing they are measuring this accurately a bit upstream of this location, where the film just would not be as good.
Re: ice cubes in water and water temp changing.
Heat exchange is more rapid the greater the difference in temps. So the ice in the glass will take up heat more rapidly and noticebly than the water.
Should we wish to calculate how fast the ice might melt or how fast and warm the water will eventually be we must note that there are many exchanges occuring: water and heat source; water and ice; ice and heat source; water and air; ice and air, air and heat source, and I’ve left out the container.
With some not really that complicated math (I think you can do it without calculus but less accurately) you can determine when the ice will melt and when the then entire mass of water will reach a particular temperature.
While glaciers and oceans and atmosphere and solar irradiance are a bit more complex than ice in a pot of water on a stove you can make an effort to understand it and do some math to get an idea what will happen and when.
Yet people I suspect couldn’t begin to do the math on ice and water in a pot on a stove will say in major US newspapers that entire scientific organizations are incorrect.
Anybody have figures for the quickest possible melt of the ice sheets ??
paulm — many centuries.
Given that every effect of climate change is happening much faster than predicted even a couple of years ago, I for one seriously doubt it will take many centuries for the ice to melt. As far as I can tell, the models have not been taking into account the feedback effects and also too, that ecosystem collapse does not occur in a steady, even trajectory but can turn suddenly and fail almost overnight.
That is what I see happening in my corner of the world.
I do agree the acting in the film seemed contrived, rehearsed and artificial. I don’t think that detracts from the amazing facts presented, just that those guys are scientists, trying to make their research accessible, not Madison Avenue advertising gurus making an informercial.
Gail — I assume he was referring to all melted, Greenland only.
But even a modest portion is already a disaster.
Paul, I guess that depends on whether you mean complete melt/disintegration, including East Antarctica. That will likely take awhile, but I haven’t seen any firm figures. Clearly, though, we don’t need to get anywhere near 100% to see impacts on millions of people. Don’t know if these recent articles have been widely covered, but they are interesting:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hJ-62rD3AVr6zA422y7R7bTiQP-wD96IIIGG0
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gCiXb1C_JnTZ19kwVF0k4Ld9b-FAD96J6H700
oh, pah. This is “yet another” of the pseudo-science reality-TV spin-doctor, “Wicked British Accent, dude” neo-hippy, BULLSHOI “science” spots.
Between the ridiculous clamoring down a bunch of ice towards a rivulet of pretty blue rushing water (the flow-rate could trivially have been measured with a stopwatch, a measuring tape, and a handful of bright orange painted corks … a la Darwin … and some pre-college trigonometry and a frikkin SLIDE RULE if ‘the cold’ was a problem) with all the ‘whoa, I’m scared, this is dangers, feel the power!” bull…
And the thousand-dollar an hour helicopter ride… (what, they couldn’t have used zero-carbon-footprint eco-friendly dogsleds, and gone on a 2 or 3 week sojourn?) …
I’m disgusted with the whole spectacle.
Want to do REAL science, jocks? Measuring tapes, corks, timers. Topographic maps, meter-scale satellite imaging, a computer and many vicarious measurements. No “there must be thousands of these” statements. No “there must be 2 or 3 thousand cubic feet per second” bull. Where’s all that proud European METRIC, damnit? Where’s the stark simplicity of conjectureless science-in-measurement?
But hey, between some media funding (“oh, oh, we got a story here!”) and a bunch of blokes with their techy-digital-wannabe-science equipment … there IS a story, and they got their parkas and helicopter rides. Home by dinner, Maud!
Jeez.
What we don’t know from the video is how many moulins there are today, their flow rates, and how many moulins there were thirty years ago, say. But GoatGuy misses the central issue: Is fossil fuel energy so safe that the world can stay with it for decades to come, without adverse consequences? The burden of proof is on GoatGuy. If he says “Stay with fossil fuel” and the world does, and climate catastrophe follows, GoatGuy has no way of making anyone whole for his colossal error of judgment. Prudence says we switch to a safer form of energy, and do so as swiftly as we can. On the general topic of “Is anything happening?” I was just out at Stanford for Parents Weekend and attended a classroom talk on water issues in California. All the snowpack mountain areas out west are down 20% over the last couple decades in average accumulation/winter, and the timing of snowmelt is now two weeks earlier. Result? The reservoirs that collect water for San Francisco are at 15% of their normal reserves just now. And farms in the central value are being completely cut off from water. Per the Governor. Drought patterns worldwide are not looking good – if these are long term shifts, we are in real trouble. I wonder if GoatGuy knows how to get the annual snowpacks back up to normal?
Wow… enough water draining each year to cover Germany a meter deep…
How can we get it shipped there though? Is a meter enough? ;)