Seas Rising 60 Percent Faster Than Projected, Study Shows

[thaibeachlovers]

The video is in English. However it is full of statistical mathematics that I doubt many of us will understand much. I did the maths a long time ago but am not willing (or able) to sit down for 6 hours and work out what the guy is talking about. I know that he has some valid points to make but it doesn't change the fact that we are approaching a catastrophe. e can't do anything about it, no amount of collecting aluminium and waste paper is going to make an impact.

I long gave up worrying about this stuff. I worry more about getting brewer's droop.

You say, "it doesn't change the fact that we are approaching a catastrophe."

and then; "e (sic) can't do anything about it, no amount of collecting aluminium and waste paper is going to make an impact."

I can understand folks getting more cynical as they approach senility, but let's at least either give some hope (and workable ideas) to younger generations, or simply step aside. Reinforcing helplessness is easy to do, but doesn't do anyone any good. Perhaps there's no intention to do good, well that's ok also, but again, step aside and let other with good energy and good ideas take the helm.

It's like saying, "I got dark bags under my eyes, deep wrinkles, and a pot belly, so nothing I do is going to make me look or feel any better. So I'll just resign myself to looking more like a sick walrus each passing day - and tell anyone who want to listen, that trying to get healthy is foolish, as we're all approaching senility, and we'll die someday. So don't even try."

So, do you actually believe that people are prepared to give up their lifestyle to try to reverse the onset of climatre change? I'm far too cynical to believe that!

Besides, even if the entire populations of Australia ,New Zealand and every expat in Thailand gave up internal combustion engines tomorrow, it would make absolutely no difference in the overall scheme of things.

It's not a black and white situation. In other words, it's not as though one sort of lifestyle will be a panacea and another will spell doom. It's a matter of degrees (pun intended).

Here's an example: if I chose to stop drugs, including alcohol and sugar and caffeine, starting tomorrow, I would not attain excellent health, even if I lived 50 more years. However, I would improve my health, compared to indulging in the harmful foods. Multiply that by half the people in the world, and peoples' overall health would improve. Pharma and hospitals would be pissed off, but tough tamales.

Similarly, if increasing # of people were first conscious of living better lifestyle and secondly practiced it, then improvements would happen. It might not lessen GW (if that is happening, which I believe it is), but less internal combustion engine usage, less electricity usage, less multi-packaged consumer items, less coal-fired power plants, ad infinitum - would leave a cleaner environment.

Here's an example: about 100 yrs ago, it was high fashion to have bird plumage in ladies hats. An environmentalist noticed birds (providing plumage) nearly extinct in Florida's Everglades. He started a movement to create awareness. It caught on. Now the birds are prolific. If not for his efforts, many of those species of birds would be extinct. Similar with fur trade. The examples of awareness and do-good movements catching on are many. California condor is another. Saving the 'right whale' is another. There are many other examples of grass-roots movements having a tangibly good effect.

As for CO2 emissions, there are a multitude of movements to lessen pollution, and there is some success therein. Of course there is colossal amount more which can be done, but all good movements have to start somewhere, with some forward-thinking people - creating awareness among others. Such movements won't start in Thailand, but most start in California.

As for young people. I meet about 200 young backpackers annually - as part of a home-stay program I host. All are fine folks. I have beaucoup faith in the younger generation, and perhaps that's what keeps me from slipping in to abject cynicism. I could be fatalistic and cynical. It's easy to slip down that slope. But I choose not to. It takes a measure of self-counseling, but that's another rap.

< I meet about 200 young backpackers annually>

Have you been to Had Rin recently for a FMP?

Apparently there are now about 10,000 bagpackers that attend every month ( was only half that when I used to go ), getting pissed, drugged up, defecating in the sea, depositing huge amounts of garbage everywhere and generally behaving badly. How much carbon was left in the straosphere to bring these sorry examples of humanity all the way to Thailand just so a few people can get very rich?

[RubbaJohnny]

Getting back to sea levels, this is how the Green/Left does 'science'.

A minor point in an Australian government report recently suggested that sea levels in Perth, Australia were rising by over 9mm per year. This was picked up by the 'progressive' media in breathless terms, about the "disturbing" and "extraordinary" rise that was more than "three times the global average."

It was left to independent researchers to point out that Perth's land (much like Bangkok's) is sinking, because of extreme groundwater extraction (by 6 mm per year).

Then it was discovered that the alarmist trend was calculated from 1993 (when sea level was at its lowest for over 50 years) to 2010, a moderately high year, so giving an extremely high trend. If the measurement had been taken from 1999 to 2012, the sea level would have been seen to have fallen.

Some of the media grudgingly backed down, but none of them questioned why such a silly and unprofessional report had been issued in the first place, proving that if you're a 'progressive', the truth is whatever makes you feel good.

Fortunately plate tectonics powered by the hot air of the miners wil lead to Perth control.

I think the TNT plan is to limit the population to those within the orbit of Rheinhart.

Interesting how few of the sources quoted in the so called debate are trained climatologists.Fox and Murdoch versus trained scientists if folks think that is a debate they are beyond reason.

[boomerangutang]

< I meet about 200 young backpackers annually>

Have you been to Had Rin recently for a FMP?

Apparently there are now about 10,000 bagpackers that attend every month ( was only half that when I used to go ), getting pissed, drugged up, defecating in the sea, depositing huge amounts of garbage everywhere and generally behaving badly. How much carbon was left in the straosphere to bring these sorry examples of humanity all the way to Thailand just so a few people can get very rich?

Young folks are amazingly adaptable. If you take a bunch of backpackers and put them in a place where drugs are sold everywhere (including alcohol) the will likely partake. The locals get drunk and stoned also, so it's part of the atmosphere. As for trash: Had Rin, like all of Thailand, has a paucity of trash receptacles and decent bathrooms. I'm not apologizing for farang littering or pissing in the sea, but there are some logistical things affecting behavior. Comparatively, Thais will toss litter much more often than farang.

In contrast, if you take the same backpackers and have them hang out at my farmstead, you'll see a whole different manifestation. There are no drugs here, there are trash receptacles available, and decent bathrooms. The atmosphere here is about nature, farming, nurturing, caring, decency - quite different than Had Rin (and I've been to Had Rin several times).

And yes, they still use jets to fly around the world. The same jets that you and I use to travel. Would be cool if sailing ships came back in vogue. Want to try an entrepreneural gig, and bring trans-continental sailing ships back? I'm open to it.

[nong38]

A UN report featuring over 200 "experts" are 95% sure Global Warming is caused by man, I heard this on BBC radio 5 yesterday around 8-10am bst, you can wend your round to rising sea levels intime and what was that thing over both the poles was also disappearing past due to HFC's, oh that one is not flavour of the month at present, maybe we will fish that one with a new report as well eh!

No such thing as natural cycles to scientists, they are too clever for that and they have peddling Global Warming for many years now and if you dont agree with it, cant see it you are as good as a flat earther, well there are other points of view and Global Warming is a bit to convenient for to many people who want to have control of my life an finances.

It was not long ago , late 80's as I recall, that the UK was going to get a much more balmy climate, then they said more recently the winters would get wetter, then we were going to be short of water supplies and this last week they now predict colder winters, well talk about hedging your bets and changing your mind!

They are all just predictions based on what imformation you choose to include or exclude.

How much did the UN shell out for the work and by the way this is the result we want.

Edited September 28, 2013 by nong38

[RickBradford]

As regards the IPCC's latest report, the Janet-and-John bit (the summary for policy makers or SPM) has just been released.

The SPM in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about sea-level, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.

[boomerangutang]

The above two posts are agenda-driven. They're the type of folks who are categorically against concepts of GW / seas rising / or high CO2 levels having effects on weather / .....regardless of scientific data. Yet, when many of the same scientists come out with data that Arctic ice seemed to be increasing (for one season out of scores), the same folks are as glad as 7 year olds at a b'day party, when the cake gets wheeled in to the party room.

[thaibeachlovers]

The above two posts are agenda-driven. They're the type of folks who are categorically against concepts of GW / seas rising / or high CO2 levels having effects on weather / .....regardless of scientific data. Yet, when many of the same scientists come out with data that Arctic ice seemed to be increasing (for one season out of scores), the same folks are as glad as 7 year olds at a b'day party, when the cake gets wheeled in to the party room.

I disagree that we are against concepts of CLIMATE CHANGE ( GW has been abandoned since there seems to be a paucity of actual warming ). Where we differ from the "scientists" is that we ( speaking presumptively ) think either that it is a natural phenomenon ( whether exacerbated by mankind or not ) or that it is caused by mankind but there is nothing that can realistically be done about it. A few windmills in Europe aren't going to combat increasing car ownership in India/ China by a long chalk.

I personally don't know the definitive reason why, but I don't think we can do anything about it, other than personally behaving responsibly. IMO, the best thing everyone could do to stop the destruction of the planet by mankind is to stop having children, but that isn't going to happen, so it's now up to Gaia, and humans won't like the solutions.

Already, antibiotic resistance is rising, along with the emergence of new and deadlier strains of flu, industrial food production is poisoning the people that eat it, obesity is an epidemic, with resulting diabetic rate rise ( 20 MILLION diabetics in India ), monoculture is just crying out for a new virus to wipe out millions of tons of wheat and corn, arable land is lost to fuel production, drought is wiping out many farming areas, lack of clean water kills millions ( and will probably start wars ) etc etc etc.

Interestingly, a real hope for population decline in India and China is the lack of females of child bearing age, due to the desire in those countries for male children. Many millions of Chinese males are destined to be wife and childless, and entire districts of India are becoming female free zones.

Perhaps there is hope for man's survival after all.

[thaibeachlovers]

< I meet about 200 young backpackers annually>

Have you been to Had Rin recently for a FMP?

Apparently there are now about 10,000 bagpackers that attend every month ( was only half that when I used to go ), getting pissed, drugged up, defecating in the sea, depositing huge amounts of garbage everywhere and generally behaving badly. How much carbon was left in the straosphere to bring these sorry examples of humanity all the way to Thailand just so a few people can get very rich?

Young folks are amazingly adaptable. If you take a bunch of backpackers and put them in a place where drugs are sold everywhere (including alcohol) the will likely partake. The locals get drunk and stoned also, so it's part of the atmosphere. As for trash: Had Rin, like all of Thailand, has a paucity of trash receptacles and decent bathrooms. I'm not apologizing for farang littering or pissing in the sea, but there are some logistical things affecting behavior. Comparatively, Thais will toss litter much more often than farang.

In contrast, if you take the same backpackers and have them hang out at my farmstead, you'll see a whole different manifestation. There are no drugs here, there are trash receptacles available, and decent bathrooms. The atmosphere here is about nature, farming, nurturing, caring, decency - quite different than Had Rin (and I've been to Had Rin several times).

And yes, they still use jets to fly around the world. The same jets that you and I use to travel. Would be cool if sailing ships came back in vogue. Want to try an entrepreneural gig, and bring trans-continental sailing ships back? I'm open to it.

Sorry, but I don't think responsible people will take illegal drugs just because they are available. Millions of young people DON'T take drugs despite the easy availability back "home", so why would they take them where the actual consequences could be so much worse? Those who go to the FMP and use illegal drugs are already illegal drug users when they arrive.

Whatever the locals do is irrelevant to what tourists should or should not do.

End of the day, young people are always blathering on about saving the world, so they can start by not using petrol driven cars and flying. However, I doubt they care that much, but they are the ones that will be living here in 50 years, not me, so the soilutions are for them to come up with. Given by what they have ACTUALLY done so far, as opposed to flying to conferences to generate copious amounts of hot air, politicians are NOT going to come up with any practical solutions.

[Scott]

A post with an oversized graphic has been removed. It causes problems with the page format.

[3NUMBAS]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25729750

Antarctica's mighty Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is now very probably in a headlong, self-sustaining retreat.

This is the conclusion of three teams that have modelled its behaviour.

Even if the region were to experience much colder conditions, the retreat would continue, the teams tell the journal Nature Climate Change.

This means PIG is set to become an even more significant contributor to global sea level rise - on the order of perhaps 3.5-10mm in the next 20 years.

"You can think of PIG like a ball. It's been kicked and it's just going to keep on rolling for the foreseeable future," said Dr Hilmar Gudmundsson from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

PIG is a colossal feature. Covering more than 160,000 sq km (two-thirds the size of the UK), it drains something like 20% of all the ice flowing off the west of the White Continent.

Satellite and airborne measurements have recorded a marked thinning and a surge in velocity in recent decades.

Its grounding line - the zone where the glacier enters the sea and lifts up and floats - has reversed tens of km over the same period.

Much of this behaviour is driven not by higher air temperatures in the cold south but by warm ocean bottom-waters getting under and eroding the floating ice shelf at the head of the glacier.

Key to PIG's observed behaviour is that a large section of it sits below sea level, with the rock bed sloping back towards the continent.

The very latest satellite data details the thinning occurring in this region of West Antarctica

This can produce what scientists refer to as a "marine ice sheet instability" - an inherently unstable architecture, which, once knocked, can go into an irreversible decline.

Dr Gudmundsson's group, together with colleagues in the UK, France, Finland and China, have used numerical models to describe PIG's current and future behaviour, and they argue that it has now entered just such a mode.

"Even if you were to reduce melt rates, you would not stop the retreat," Dr Gudmundsson told BBC News.

"We did a number of model runs where we allowed PIG to retreat some distance back, and then we lowered the melt rates in our models. And despite doing that, the grounding line continued to retreat.

"You can talk about external forcing factors, such climate and ocean effects, and then there are internal factors which are the flow dynamics. What we find is that the internal dynamics of flow are such that the retreat is now self-sustaining."

This has major implications for sea level rise.

The Amundsen Bay, the area of West Antarctica containing PIG and other large glaciers, is currently dumping more than 150 cu km of ice a year into the ocean.

If the forecasts of Dr Gudmundsson and colleagues are correct, PIG could now lead an accelerating trend.

The teams write in their journal paper: "The [PIG's] associated mass loss increases substantially over the course of our simulations from the average value of 20 billion tonnes a year observed for the 1992-2011 period, up to and above 100 billion tonnes a year, equivalent to 3.5-10mm eustatic sea-level rise over the following 20 years."

By way of comparison, the most recent satellite data suggested West Antarctica as a whole was contributing about one-third of one millimetre per year to sea level rise.

[boomerangutang]

The Amundsen Bay, the area of West Antarctica containing PIG and other large glaciers, is currently dumping more than 150 cu km of ice a year into the ocean.

If the forecasts of Dr Gudmundsson and colleagues are correct, PIG could now lead an accelerating trend.

The teams write in their journal paper: "The [PIG's] associated mass loss increases substantially over the course of our simulations from the average value of 20 billion tonnes a year observed for the 1992-2011 period, up to and above 100 billion tonnes a year, equivalent to 3.5-10mm eustatic sea-level rise over the following 20 years."

GW deniers thought Antarctica was maintaining, and most of warmists' bellyaching was about the Arctic. So deniers were twisting themselves in loops trying to show that the Arctic melting is either 'not happening' or 'was not significant'. Now the deniers may have to address what's going on in Antarctica also. But rest assured, they will find some weird 'science' which will somehow convince other deniers that it's no big deal. You gotta hand it to deniers, they're sure creative in refuting good science.

[RickBradford]

^^^

I gotta hand it to you, you're sure creative in redefining the term 'good science'.

The US's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC, sponsored by NASA among others) recently reported that Antarctic sea ice reached a record all-time high in September 2013 of 19.47 million sqm, so if anyone has to "address what's going on in Antarctica" it is the interminable bedwetters of the climate alarmist movement.

Good science, unfortunately for the alarmist climate activists, still starts with numbers.

[boomerangutang]

Antarctica is losing overall ice mass. Some studies show as much as 50 cubic miles annually. There's interesting new methods which gauge the amounts of meltwater which goes under large glaciers - in to the sea. That data may prove significant. Plus, melting, where glaciers meet rock, will facilitate the glacier's movement toward the sea, and therefore its calving. The scientists who devise and implement such measurements are doing some tough work in harsh conditions. I don't put them down (as deniers would), but rather, I commend them.

P.S. in response to RB's assertion, above: Square Km coverage of sea ice, is not the same as overall mass of ice. It's possible, the area of sea covered could increase, while thickness decreases, thereby lessening overall mass of ice - which is what's been happening in Antarctic in recent years.

Edited May 3, 2014 by boomerangutang

[RickBradford]

It's possible, the area of sea covered could increase, while thickness decreases, thereby lessening overall mass of ice - which is what's been happening in Antarctic in recent years.

Not according to NASA. Their latest study shows an estimated net increase of mass of the Antarctic ice sheet of 49 gigatons per year.The data is collected by satellite telemetry using lasers to measure ice thickness.

So, in Antarctica, we have:-

* Increasing ice sheet mass

* Advancing glaciers

* Increasing sea ice

Global warming, anyone?

[sirineou]

The researchers used data from satellites which have measured the rise in sea levels by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface. "Satellites have a much better coverage of the globe than tide gauges and are able to measure much more accurately by using radar waves and their reflection from the sea surface," said Anny Cazenave of LEGOS.

How can we take any of these seriously when the people making the predictions use LEGOS to do it?