Stop Global Warming!!! discussion
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Icebergs Melting
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Is it okay to do da phrase "long story short"
It may seem that I am totally non-environmentalist, but I really do care. However, scientific studies have shown that the planet has been naturally heating and cooling since it came into being; called, the ice-age, or melt-down. Not the 3-D movie.
http://www.douglassreport.com/reports...I know that I've been posting this everywhere, but I really do believe that it is true.
haha yeah...i believe u lol (i read it so many times now... hahaha :)
hahah its okay...wow haha that was along time ago
One of the poles... I forget which is actually growing, according to recent studies.
Lol. Pretty small reaction. They think that it's going to close in Greenland again.
lol....well i mean, i already got over the big reaction u know....(hmm..close in greenland, thats cool)
I know! While one pole is said to be melting, but isn't, the other one is supposedly growing… hmmmm…?
Some one the Earth heating and Cooling is natural but not this much! (what has been happening I wanna talk about the issues but I don't want to read all of that :D)
I FEEL SO BAD FOR THE CUTE LITTLE POLAR BEARS...
if the ice reflects the sunlight away and is needed for that and other reasons what else can subtitute it until the ice freezes agian? What else reflects light? Mirrors. Mirrors are able to reflect light. but how are the mirrors supposed to float? I have heard we are already doing something else quite simular to what i'm thinking of; docks. For environmental reasons we have reused used bottles to help docks float. Why can't we do that? Use the recycled bottles to keep the mirrors floating so they can reflect the sunlight or 'rays'? It will help with two problems- plastic, and the icebergs melting.
oh boy, what is happening to out poor lil earthy? :'((haha, it's kinda funny that i say "lil" earthy, because the earth is HUGE! :D)
Enlarge image Enlarge File photo, AP
An iceberg melts off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland in 2007. More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA data.
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.
NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren't complete yet, but this year's ice loss, while still significant, won't be as severe as 2007.
The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.
In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.
Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn't add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said in a telephone interview from the conference.
Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.
Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.
"It's not getting better; it's continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification," Zwally said. "There's no reversal taking place."
Scientists studying sea ice will announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That's when the Arctic warms faster than predicted, and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere on the globe.
As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
That's a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.
"The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.
Two other studies coming out at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane — the second most potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve says.
A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer.
The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said.
That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."